Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
450
400
350
300
250
VOIP
200
switched
150
100
50
0
Fig. 4.1 Global telephony minutes in switched and VOIP mode, 1989-2010. Source redrawn
from Telegeography.com
VocalTec, which introduced software allowing voice traffic among personal
computers. Soon thereafter, it and other companies extended this process over the
internet. Essentially, this mode allows voice traffic to ride over a system designed
originally only for data by ''packetizing'' voices in a form amenable to TCP/IP
formats, leading to a convergence of voice and data traffic. Three versions of VOIP
exist: computer-to-computer, computer-to-phone, and phone-to-phone, each of
which involves different technical challenges in switching data packets. The
extremely low price of VOIP results from its ability to bypass expensive dedicated
circuits between callers by encoding calls as two-way streams of data packets sent
over broadband internet connections. Thus, VOIP is not a new product per se, but a
means of utilizing the existing internet infrastructure more efficiently, an in the
process, uncoupling internet access from internet services. As Werbach (
2005
,
p. 140) puts it, ''What makes it so potent is that it tums speech into digital data
packets that can be stored, searched, manipulated, copied, combined with other
data, and distributed to virtually any device that connects to the Internet. Think of
it, basically, as the World Wide Web for the voice.''
VOIP rapidly mushroomed into a multibillion dollar industry. Early concerns
over poor quality of transmission were eased as the technology adapted to the
growing broadband market; indeed, the growth of VOIP and broadband internet
have gone hand-in-hand. As internet telephony rose in popularity, it attracted
investments in routing and switching equipment from large network producers such
as Lucent and Cisco. VOIP has grown rapidly at the expense of its alternative, public
switched telephone network (PSTN) telephone traffic; from a minuscule 4 % of the
world's telephony traffic in 2000, VOIP has expanded to roughly 27 % in 2010
(Fig.
4.1
). Indeed, while traffic growth rates for PSTN systems have dropped to rates
of 8-10 % annually, VOIP traffic is rising at rates twice or three times as high.
