Voip calls how does it work

Nextiva also has several useful advanced features. For instance, you can connect your VoIP phone system with real-time live chat and with your CRM system to help you create a unified communications system. Plus, their support team is extremely helpful, making it really easy for you to get started. This is why we use Nextiva for our business. You also need an internet connection with good bandwidth. This normally means using a broadband internet connection.

There are lots of different business VoIP providers , and it can be hard to know which one is the best for your needs. Over the years we have helped thousands of beginners choose the best VoIP phone platform. We have heard almost every possible question about VoIP that you can think of. Most VoIP services will include unlimited domestic calls for no extra charge.

However, some cheaper VoIP services charge based on the number of minutes you use. The international rates will vary depending on the VoIP provider you use, but these rates will almost always be more affordable than traditional landline rates for international calls. Yes, when switching from traditional landline phone to business VoIP phone, you can ask for number porting which lets you keep your existing business phone number.

Some VoIP services have a backup in case your broadband connection is down or your power goes out. For instance, Nextiva can automatically forward calls to a cell phone.

Yes, most good VoIP phone service providers include call routing, phone extensions, call queue, and auto attendant at no additional cost. We hope this article helped answer the questions of what is VoIP and how does it work behind the scenes.

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You can also subscribe without commenting. All Rights Reserved. Also, to ensure the best voice quality and security, consider using your VoIP or other communications system on a private IP network. You'll save money by having one network to manage instead of two. You can easily add, move, or change phone extensions and locations, which saves money and gives you more flexibility. Your workforce can use your communications system from home or on the road.

Also, wireless IP phones connect users to your communications system and data resources, such as customer information, while they're in the warehouse, on the sales floor, or anywhere they can access your data network wirelessly. You paid a lot for the call, because you actually owned a 3,mile-long copper wire for 10 minutes. Telephone conversations over today's traditional phone network are somewhat more efficient and they cost a lot less. Your voice is digitized , and your voice along with thousands of others can be combined onto a single fiber optic cable for much of the journey there's still a dedicated piece of copper wire going into your house, though.

These calls are transmitted at a fixed rate of 64 kilobits per second Kbps in each direction, for a total transmission rate of Kbps. Since there are 8 kilobits Kb in a kilobyte KB , this translates to a transmission of 16 KB each second the circuit is open, and KB every minute it's open.

In a minute conversation, the total transmission is 9, KB, which is roughly equal to 10 megabytes check out How Bits and Bytes Work to learn about these conversions. If you look at a typical phone conversation, much of this transmitted data is wasted.

A packet-switched phone network is the alternative to circuit switching. It works like this: While you're talking, the other party is listening, which means that only half of the connection is in use at any given time. Based on that, we can surmise that we could cut the file in half, down to about 4.

Plus, a significant amount of the time in most conversations is dead air -- for seconds at a time, neither party is talking. If we could remove these silent intervals, the file would be even smaller. Then, instead of sending a continuous stream of bytes both silent and noisy , what if we sent just the packets of noisy bytes when you created them? Data networks do not use circuit switching. Your Internet connection would be a lot slower if it maintained a constant connection to the Web page you were viewing at any given time.

Instead, data networks simply send and retrieve data as you need it. And, instead of routing the data over a dedicated line, the data packets flow through a chaotic network along thousands of possible paths. This is called packet switching. While circuit switching keeps the connection open and constant, packet switching opens a brief connection -- just long enough to send a small chunk of data, called a packet , from one system to another.

It works like this:. Packet switching is very efficient. It lets the network route the packets along the least congested and cheapest lines. It also frees up the two computers communicating with each other so that they can accept information from other computers, as well. VoIP technology uses the Internet's packet-switching capabilities to provide phone service. VoIP has several advantages over circuit switching. For example, packet switching allows several telephone calls to occupy the amount of space occupied by only one in a circuit-switched network.

Using PSTN, that minute phone call we talked about earlier consumed 10 full minutes of transmission time at a cost of Kbps. With VoIP, that same call may have occupied only 3. Based on this simple estimate, another three or four calls could easily fit into the space used by a single call under the conventional system.

And this example doesn't even factor in the use of data compression , which further reduces the size of each call. Let's say that you and your friend both have service through a VoIP provider. You both have your analog phones hooked up to the service-provided ATAs.

Let's take another look at that typical telephone call, but this time using VoIP over a packet-switched network:. Probably one of the most compelling advantages of packet switching is that data networks already understand the technology.

By migrating to this technology, telephone networks immediately gain the ability to communicate the way computers do. It will still be at least a decade before communications companies can make the full switch over to VoIP. As with all emerging technologies, there are certain hurdles that have to be overcome. We'll look at those in the next section. The current Public Switched Telephone Network is a robust and fairly bulletproof system for delivering phone calls.

Phones just work, and we've all come to depend on that. On the other hand, computers, e-mail and other related devices are still kind of flaky. Let's face it -- few people really panic when their e-mail goes down for 30 minutes.

It's expected from time to time. On the other hand, a half hour of no dial tone can easily send people into a panic. So what the PSTN may lack in efficiency it more than makes up for in reliability. But the network that makes up the Internet is far more complex and therefore functions within a far greater margin of error.

What this all adds up to is one of the major flaws in VoIP: reliability. One of the hurdles that was overcome some time ago was the conversion of the analog audio signal your phone receives into packets of data.

How it is that analog audio is turned into packets for VoIP transmission? The answer is codecs. A codec, which stands for coder-decoder , converts an audio signal into compressed digital form for transmission and then back into an uncompressed audio signal for replay.

It's the essence of VoIP. Codecs accomplish the conversion by sampling the audio signal several thousand times per second. For instance, a G. It converts each tiny sample into digitized data and compresses it for transmission. When the 64, samples are reassembled, the pieces of audio missing between each sample are so small that to the human ear, it sounds like one continuous second of audio signal.

There are different sampling rates in VoIP depending on the codec being used:. Codecs use advanced algorithms to help sample, sort, compress and packetize audio data. The codec works with the algorithm to convert and sort everything out, but it's not any good without knowing where to send the data. In VoIP, that task is handled by soft switches. This is the numbering system that phone networks use to know where to route a call based on the dialed numbers.

A phone number is like an address:. The switches use "" to route the phone call to the area code's region. The "" prefix sends the call to a central office, and the network routes the call using the last four digits, which are associated with a specific location.

Based on that system, no matter where you're in the world, the number combination " " always puts you in the same central office, which has a switch that knows which phone is associated with " They look for IP addresses, which look like this:. IP addresses correspond to a particular device on the network like a computer, a router, a switch, a gateway or a telephone.

However, IP addresses are not always static. They're assigned by a DHCP server on the network and change with each new connection. This mapping process is handled by a central call processor running a soft switch.

Think of the user and the phone or computer as one package -- man and machine. That package is called the endpoint. The soft switch connects endpoints.

The soft switch contains a database of users and phone numbers. If it doesn't have the information it needs, it hands off the request downstream to other soft switches until it finds one that can answer the request. Once it finds the user, it locates the current IP address of the device associated with that user in a similar series of requests.

It sends back all the relevant information to the softphone or IP phone, allowing the exchange of data between the two endpoints. Soft switches work in tandem with network devices to make VoIP possible. For all these devices to work together, they must communicate in the same way. This communication is one of the most important aspects that will have to be refined for VoIP to take off.

At Structured Communications, we have years of experience in delivering first-class internet telephony solutions. To find out more, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Skip to content. Get In Touch:. Contact Us. What is VoIP? How do VoIP phones work? A VoIP phone works according to the following steps: When a VoIP phone receives the digital data from another device, it splits the data into information packets and puts a destination address on each packet.

The converted data is then sent over your broadband line to your router. Once the router has received the data, it finds the shortest path to its destination.