VoIP Voice Over Internet Protocol

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is the generic term to describe a family of communications technologies that delivery voice communications over internet protocol (IP) networks such as the Internet and other packet-switched networks. Over the last couple of years the title VoIP has become the term of choice to describe IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, and broadband phone. 

VoIP systems interface with the regular telephone network the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to allow for transparent phone communications worldwide between VoIP and the traditional telephone networks .

VoIP systems make use of protocols to control the set-up and end of calls as well as audio codecs which encode speech. This allows transmission over the IP network as digital audio via an audio stream. Codec use is varied between different implementations of VoIP some implementations rely on narrowband and compressed speech, while others support high fidelity stereo codecs.