When I opened Todd Cardin Answering Service twenty years ago there were not a lot of options in phone service. Today there are so many options and choices in telephony that it is mind boggling. It is confusing living with so many choices. Even those of us in the telecommunications industry find it impossible to keep up with everything. This is especially true for voice over IP.

Many people hear the term Voice over IP or broadband telephone service and still are not sure what that means. VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. Using VoIP, voice information is converted into digital packets and sent over the Internet, and then converted back into analog signals before reaching the phone receiver at the other end. This is a growing and new technology which will surely expand as the number of broadband connections increase.

There are two types of VoIP service. The first is called hardware based VoIP. People using this type of VoIP phone services, have their phone fitted with an adapter that will connect to a high-speed Internet connection. When a call is made, it goes through your local telephone company to the VoIP provider, and then over the Internet to the other parties telephone .The second type is software based VoIP phone services, where you use a microphone headset plugged into your computer and make calls, which are routed through your cable modem, by using the keyboard. VoIP can also be run over a private data network.

The big advantage of VoIP is that voice information sent over the Internet avoids using the fixed circuitry of traditional telephony networks