What is VoIP?

VoIP, which stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, is a technology that allows voice or video calls to be made over the internet instead of over landline or mobile networks.

In infrastructure terms, VoIP differs from traditional telephony in that after being decided and digitised, the information is sent across a packet-switched network (where data is divided into packets, sent across the network, and put back together at the other end) instead of a circuit-switched network, where the network creates a dedicated circuit between two devices in order for information to pass between them.

For consumers and end users, VoIP significantly reduces costs. Having initially been offered on a pricing model similar to the legacy telephone network, it is now almost always priced in the same way Internet access it offered free of charge within apps or communications platforms, regardless of where in the world the connection (in this case, the call) is being placed to.

VoIP also applies to video calling, which was either not possible or prohibitively expensive using existing communications infrastructure. Additionally, for enterprise, VoIP options are usually also easier to scale up, requiring fewer if any physical changes to connectivity infrastructure.

As VoIP relies on an internet connection to send and receive the packets containing the information in the call, it often does not work if there is no Internet signal or if the connection is weak. However, the integration of VoIP into next-generation mobile networks by technologies such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Voice over 5G (Vo5G) has helped deliver additional features not available with standard VoIP, such as SLA structures and emergency call support.

For carriers, the growth in popularity of VoIP has come at the expense of the traditional voice market, which had more established paths to monetisation, billing and trading.