Technology Reports

In the last few months switching from traditional telephony to voip has become much easire than it was just a few short years ago.  The thing that helped make this happen was a wonderful little device called an ATA.  An ATA or Analogue Telephone Adaptor is a little box that you plug 1 side into a normal telephone handset and the other side plugs into a network connection on your Broadband Router.

This little box made it possible to use VoIP on an ordinary telephone and not even have your computer turned on!  Now, by making it “easy for the masses” and non techo people, this little box was the turning point for VoIP.

Now, you could go out and buy an ATA and then try and learn how to put all the setting into it to make it work.  This is probably only something that less than 1% of all VoIP users do - yep the techo types (I am included in that small category), or you could probably buy the Adaptor already set up for you when you sign up with a VoIP provider.  Buying an Adaptor ready to go and following a simple sign-up process made it possible for everyone who has broadband to exploit it and get cheaper Telephone calls.

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol and it is all about using the Internet to carry voice rather than data.  It is not a brand new technology and has been around for several years.  What is interesting about VoIP is that it is starting to take off as a mainstream way of making Voice calls.  Until only a couple of years ago, VoIP was only used by a very small number of people whe were both Internet savvy and had a high speed or Broadband Internet connection.

In it’s simplest form VoIP calls are from 1 computer to another.  You only need a soft phone, a Headset with a microphone plugged into your sound card, a Broadband Internet connection and a VoIP provider.   What is attractive about VoIP is that nearly all VoIP providers give you free Internet to Internet voice phone calls!

What is starting to attract people to use VoIP in place of a traditional telephone service is the very cheap telephone calls that it offers.  You can call from VoIP to a standard telephone and the call cost is normally only a few pennies per minute to almost anywhere in the world making it much cheaper than traditional telephone calls.