Mr. Bell (VOIP)

Believe it or not, the roots of VoIP go all the way back to the 1870s. In 1879, Alexander Graham Bell forgot his Internet password and, knowing that his assistant had stashed it away, uttered the famous words “Watson! Are you there?” He never got on the Internet, but he did prove that the human voice
could be carried electronically over a pair of wires. He also demonstrated that the endpoints for these wires had to be connected to the right equipment — hardware that he invented. Mr. Bell’s inventions ushered in an age of communication that made the world much smaller than it had ever been before.
When Mr. Bell invented the telephone and thereby gave birth to the telephone network, VoIP was not even a consideration. (Truth be told, the idea of a network wasn’t yet a consideration either.) Other inventions would be required before VoIP could become a reality.
The first telephone equipment was analog. Historians and technicians alike have labeled the first phone service POTS, or plain old telephone service. VoIP won’t function very well over a POTS system; it requires a digital network.
Digital networking for telephones was invented in the 1920s, but the first digital networks would not leave the laboratory until much later, in 1964. Today, most phone companies in the United States have updated their equipment to include digital service.
Over time, the POTS network gave way to the PSTN, or public switched telephone network. (The terms PSTN, public switched telephone network, public telephone network, and phone network are used synonymously.)
Although it occurred in what seems like the ancient past, Alexander Graham Bell’s work is important in understanding VoIP. The POTS network that began with his invention has grown into the largest circuit-switched network in the world. It also has become an expensive network, with individuals and companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year for communication services.
VoIP, which was developed in 1995, is gradually replacing the PSTN. Some view the PSTN as the antithesis of VoIP, but it still remains the standard of quality by which VoIP is measured. For instance, people often ask whether VoIP provides voice quality as good as what is delivered through the PSTN. Most of the factors used to evaluate the quality of VoIP are based in some way on the PSTN, so understanding a bit about the older networks is important.