History of VOIP

VoIP was originally developed to provide voice communication between computer users in different locations. Although it still has this application, it has been further developed into a telephone network in its own right.
It all started back in the very early days of the internet - some time in the mid 1990s - when researchers and computer enthusiasts took a serious interest in sending voice data over an internet connection. Software was developed that enabled the transmission of voice data from one computer to another.
In order to communicate with another computer user, a modem, sound card, speakers, and a microphone were required.

The sound quality was very poor, and nowhere near the quality of a standard telephone connection. Also, these voice connections could only occur between computers which had the same communication software installed.

This technology is commonly referred to today as VoIP and is, in simple terms, the process of breaking up voice/audio into small chunks (or packets), compressing the chunks, transmitting those chunks over an IP network (e.g. the Internet), and reassembling those chunks at the receiving end, so that two people can communicate using voice/audio.

The technology continued to be developed, and by 1998 gateways had been established to allow PC to phone connections.
   

Later in that same year, phone to phone connections that used the Internet for voice transmission were developed and put in place.  These phone to phone connections still required a computer to initiate the call, but once the connection was established, the callers could use a regular phone.

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