VOIP basically involves converting analog voice into binary bits, packaging it as IT packets, and routing it over the same network that carries your data.

If your just starting out with VOIP the COMMUNICATIONS ALLIANCE which is the peak body for the Australian communications industry has put out an easy to understand brochure/ebook which you can download here in doc or in PDF

Here is a short video to help you understand VOIP a little more.

To see a range of our VOIP products click here

Click here to view the embedded video.

The benefits of Voip include:

• Less infrastructure. With telephone traffic traveling over your data network, you only need to maintain one infrastructure (data) and not two (telephone and data), and less infrastructure means less cost in the long run.

• Lower service charges. Early adopters of VOIP saw its biggest benefit in reducing or even eliminating long distance charges. While this is still a big draw for VOIP, some large telcos are seeking some kind of toll for providing Quality of Service (QoS) for piggyback IP traffic, so the magnitude of this benefit may decrease over time.

• Integrated messaging. VOIP makes it easier to integrate phone, fax, and email into a single messaging system since each of these messaging formats is now carried over the same infrastructure. VOIP makes unified messaging or convergence a reality instead of merely a mantra.

• New tools. VOIP also leverages the creative power of computing to telephone traffic, which means new tools and applications can be developed to do things with voice communications that couldn’t be done using traditional circuit-switched phone systems. VOIP also makes telephone services more manageable for companies, and can give them greater control over how these services are deployed and maintained.

• Global mobility. Wireless VOIP promises even greater benefits since the Internet is now ubiquitous everywhere, so a mobile VOIP phone that works at a hotspot in Kansas should also work in Taipei, Glasgow, or Sydney just as easily once this new technology has proliferated. In fact, wireless VOIP may even displace 3G as a global mobile communication standard, though we’ll have to wait and see how the market shakes out on this.

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To see a range of our VOIP products click here

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You will here a lot of people talking about SIP.

SIP. Session Initiation Protocol is defined in RFC 2543 and is a lightweight VOIP protocol that has gained in popularity recently.

SIP was designed to help overcome some of the incompatibility issues that have prevented VOIP systems from different vendors from interoperating properly with each other. SIP is basically a signaling protocol for call setup and teardown, and does this using ASCII messages similar to how SMTP, HTTP, and other TCP/IP application layer protocols work.

SIP doesn’t completely replace H.323 however but it does sidestep some of the mechanisms of that standard, and the result is that while H.323 is seen as the established top dog in the VOIP world, many vendors see SIP as the way of the future and are aggressively promoting products that support SIP in their VOIP offerings.

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Product of the Week Siemens 580IP

The phone for fixed line and VoIP calls with PC-off convenience

The Gigaset A580 IP offers two ways to call your friends and family all over the world; with dual mode functionality you can easily switch between internet and fixed-line calls at the touch of a button. Even with your PC turned off, you can enjoy the convenience of internet calls in exceptional sound quality thanks to HDSP™ technology.

The Gigaset A580 IP is multi-line so you are free to register up to 6 handsets for 6 SIP accounts from different providers and make up to 3 calls in parallel: 2 VoIP calls and 1 fixed-line call. There is a whole package of Next Generation features on this phone, including free info services such as RSS feeds, weather forecasts, a bid-watcher for eBay and an online phonebook search¹ all directly accessible from the handset.

Whether you use the easy configuration of internet telephony with PC-off convenience or the hands-free mode to talk, you’ll find the Gigaset A580 IP simply smart. And with its energy-saving ECO DECT technology, calling is better for the environment.

If you are looking for a dual mode multi-line phone for internet calls with PC-off convenience, then the Gigaset A580 IP is the smart choice.