You may think you don’t know what VoIP is, but if you’ve ever made a call using the internet, whether on your computer or mobile phone, you’ve used it. VoIP stands for “Voice over internet Protocol” and lets you use the internet as a transmission medium for voice and video calls through voice data in packets using IP instead of the traditional circuit transmissions. Not quite sure what that means? We’re here to clarify.

History

VoIP technology begins close to 100 years ago, at Bell Laboratories by the inventor of the telephone.

1938: Invention Vocoder

Homer Dudley (an engineer in Bells Labs) made the first electronic voice synthesizer, called the Vocoder, that seamlessly records voice samples on one phone and recreates them on another and was made public at the New York World Fair in 1938.

1973: First Voice Data Packet Transmission

1973 was the year of ‘First Voice Data Packet Transmitted.’ It was the year of the foundation of modern VoIP technology, a result of Linear Predictive Coding (LPC), a speech analysis technique relying on a linear predictive model that first processes and then resynthesizes compressed forms of speech and voice signals.

1989-1991: VoIP App Released as a Public Domain

We were then introduced with the first wideband audio codec in 1988, followed by the first VoIP app released as a public domain between 1989-1991.

1993 – 1996: Audio Telepresence System

In 1993, the first audio telepresence system was released, followed by the first for-profit VoIP application in 1995 and the first hosted PBX solution and SIP development in 1996.

1999: Asterisk, first IP-PBX Launched

Asterisk, the first IP-PBX, was developed in 1999. After that, the world of VoIP took off. 2003-2004 became the year of Skype and Vonage, and we saw the rise of mobile VoIP in the year 2005 and 2006. It was primarily during this time that many today who have a negative view of VoIP got that bad taste in their mouths, which we will talk about later in this article.

This is because, while technology is coming into its adolescence, broadband internet has not yet caught up with its older brother. This caused latency issues that were practically imperceptible to the average PC user and were usually only seen in the form of web pages that loaded slower than usual. However, since voice calls occur in real-time, this was highly detrimental to the reputation of VoIP, which of course is 100% reliant on the quality of one’s internet connection.

2010-2016: The Year of VoIP

As broadband internet quickly grew in both prevalence and reliability, VoIP went completely mainstream between 2010- 2016, and after that, we were introduced to remote work, VoIP and cloud telephony, and Unified Communications to date. That’s a quick throwback to how VoIP grew into what it is today.

So, what is VoIP (Voice over internet Protocol)?

To try to simplify what VoIP really is, allow us to take you a few years back to the time when people first started using the internet. As a free and open network that enables people to share information with one another, the internet was mainly used at the time for passing on static web page information. Back then, to make a call, a user would have to be connected to a specific phone service. However, not long after, it became clear that rather than just passing along static information, the internet could be used for making calls. That’s where VoIP comes into the picture, enabling anyone who is connected to the internet, be it on their mobile or desktop, to make a call using the internet.

And in case you’d like to get a more technical explanation on what VoIP is, here it is: the internet transmission mechanism is called packet switching. In packet switching the sender divides the data into small blocks and transmits them over the internet network, which is exactly what happens to your voice or video data when you use a VoIP calling service.

The voice data is compressed and divided into small blocks that are sent over the internet to your friend on the other side of the internet. In the days before VoIP, closed networks used a different transmission technology called circuit switching. The circuit switching transmission mechanism required a dedicated channel and was both less flexible and available for usage.