Initially, one of the major concerns in the deployment of VoIP was the reliability and predictability of the call’s quality. VoIP was found to work perfectly on Local Area Networks (LAN) when all the phones, software or physical, shared the same wire and had little or no competition for bandwidth. However when making long distance calls across a Wide Area Network (WAN) things became far more unpredictable. Just like data applications running Client/Server models that required timely responses, VoIP was finding that IP’s inherent strength, its inbuilt robustness and error detection and correction techniques, made it ironically unsuitable for voice. IP would have to adapt, and adapt it did through many protocols such as UDP, RTP, SIP. Additionally header compression, QoS, traffic management and queuing techniques evolved to allow voice packets to be given priority and to be transported reliably across the internet. However, quality and predictability have improved dramatically in all major countries allowing VoIP to flourish. Continue reading →