New vs old; ushering in a new era

The development of technology is something we all expect to see these days, even looking back to 40-50 years ago when we saw illustrations of what people of that time thought our time might look like, and while you may be disillusioned by the strange haircuts and the odd “futuristic” designs, we’re not that far off; we have touchscreen computers, talking computers, hoovers and lawnmowers that push themselves around and almost every single one of us carries our own personal minicomputer in our pockets in the form of a smartphone.

This article however looks at the rise of VoIP technology and how we are moving into a new stage in communications technology; for quite a few years now this technology has been developing, through rocky beginnings when it was flaky, unreliable and complicated to modern times where it’s now the solution of choice for many companies when it comes to business communications.

Several key things have happened to VoIP to bring it up from its troubled start; the one that should probably be got out the way early on; there were a lot of VoIP “cowboys” who’d set VoIP solutions up on internet connections which really weren’t able to handle the load and without some of the clever little tweaks to the line it produced a service which was virtually unusable for some people, not exactly ideal for a budding business. Thankfully, most of these companies are out of business now.

The second big development was the internet; the internet continues to develop at a rate of knots and it is the very foundation of VoIP technology, the extra speed and stability here has really helped level out a lot of the problems VoIP phone systems suffered in its early days.

The third development, slightly mentioned in the first, are the small little tweaks to the way VoIP data is handled to try and clear up the quality of the call. These are things like packet priority for VoIP packets so they are less likely to get caught in a backlog of less ping sensitive data. Also reconstructing the data correctly on the other end instead of just regurgitating it as and when it comes really helps to clear the call quality up and eliminate or reduce the effects of latency on the line.

While it seems simple when said like that, these developments are really far from it, these changes have helped a technology which offered a cheaper service with a load of baggage into the brilliant technology which looks set to take over the telecommunications industry and it probably wouldn’t be here if not for those people who took the dive early on and made it happen, so hats off to those bold few!