Voice over IP (VoIP) for Enterprise Communications

Voice over IP (or VoIP) has changed the way employees communicate with each other, customers, and suppliers. Starting as a simple way to eliminate toll charges by packetizing the bitstreams of voice communications and routing them as IP packets, voice over IP once delivered poor audio quality that in many cases was similar to ancient rural telephony systems where the fence wire was the conductor. Today's voice over IP vendors (including 3Com) have worked hard during the past decade to improve quality, reduce cost, and implement new services and applications that go far beyond the capabilities of the most modern legacy PBX. Voice over IP has proven already, and will prove in the future even more forcefully, that it is an exceptionally effective way for people to communicate.

Despite its humble heritage, the market for voice over IP products and services cannot be ignored. As the market for voice over IP products approaches a billion dollars in equipment sales in 2005, enterprise interest is gaining extraordinary momentum.

Voice over IP is a packet technology allowing the analog waves of our spoken words to be converted to digital signals and then packetized. Packets are sent over the IP network to the end point for reassembly and conversion to sound.

In business phone systems, the voice over IP infrastructure is organized into three basic components:

• The voice over IP call controller (call manager or location server) knows where every device is (all call requests are forwarded here and then passed to the target device). Once a call is accepted the location server drops out of the packet flow, allowing the endpoints to communicate using the fastest, shortest paths.
• The voice over IP devices (phones, gateways, or computers) are intelligent because they have an IP address, send and receive packets, and, in many designs, can include data services such as global directory, network time, local weather reports, news streaming and the like.
• The voice over IP network has a large role in ensuring the quality of the transmitted audio. Quality of Service features in the network can allow voice packets to earn priority transit through network bottlenecks and avoid congestion, packet loss, and jittery sound.

Voice over IP for businesses delivers an entirely new set of applications beyond dial tone. These new applications enable business productivity and new levels of customer interaction. Find out more about 3Com voice over IP offerings.