VOIP Service: Sign Me Up!

VOIP providers are very useful and very cheap. Most providers offer VOIP connections free of charge. They make their money by charging for calls to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). Most providers allow you to call any phone number in the world for a moderately low fee. For modest monthly fees (about $8-$20), they offer unlimited calls to certain geographic areas. They also provide voicemail, call forwarding and conference calls, at no extra charge.

Vonage, BroadVoice, Diamond, iConnectHere, Lingo, mywebphone, Packet8, and VoicePulse are some of the VOIP providers. Most of these companies are based in the United States; some also have offices in other countries.

VOIP equipment includes a broadband modem and an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) or IP phone. Both the ATA and IP phone connect directly to the modem, but the ATA allows you to use older analog phones. No matter which equipment you use, it has a unique number that identifies your current IP (Internet Protocol) address. If you're constantly on the move and connect to the Internet from various locations, your VOIP provider tracks your current IP address. This allows people to contact you from wherever you are.

Even if you're not moving around and are using your Internet phone from a single location, a VOIP provider is usually still necessary. The majority of residential Internet connections have 'dynamic' IP addresses. This means that every time you reconnect to the Internet, your service provider assigns a new IP address.

The VOIP provider is useful, even if you have a static IP address (an IP address that never changes), because people can contact you by entering your user name, rather than your IP address.

When choosing a VOIP provider, keep in mind the protocol they use. SIP seems to be the emerging standard. It offers fairly easy connection routes between different VOIP providers. H.323 and IAX protocols are sometimes offered in addition to SIP. Skype, popular for PC-to-PC VOIP systems, uses a proprietary protocol. This means that it is not easy to connect to the Skype network from another VOIP provider. Skype has a service called SkypeIn, however, which allows Skype users to receive incoming calls from PSTN networks.

In some cases you can bypass a VOIP provider and enter your own IP addresses. Some hardware allows you to manually enter IP addresses, but this is really impractical. Most people have dynamic IP addresses, so there is no way of knowing anyone's IP address at any moment, unless they contact you first with the information. Then you have to initiate a VOIP call before they disconnect from the Internet.