VOIP Call

A VOIP call is similar to a normal telephone call, except that voices are sent back and forth digitally as packets over a network or over the Internet.  The end result is similar to a phone call, but it can be more efficiently made over long distances with fewer resources.  There are a lot places online that you can make free or low-cost VOIP calls. They tend to be cheaper but also a bit lower quality than traditional long distance calls.

You have probably made a VOIP call before and not even known it.  While the effect for you and the person with whom you are speaking is similar to a traditional phone call, the mechanism is different.  In a traditional phone, your voice is sent over the line using an electrical signal that continuously various to represent your voice.  This signals is continuously played into a speaker at the other end of the call.  A VOIP call works differently.  At each side of the call, your voice is recorded and converted into digital packets and send over the Internet. While moving across the internet, these packets look similar to other traffic on the internet including web pages being browsed, songs being downloaded and emails being sent.  When they reach their destination at the place where you are making the call, the signals are reconverted into sound.  This turns out to be much less expensive than a traditional phone call and many cheap phone cards these days are actually VOIP calls. 

A VOIP call can be of poorer quality than traditional phone calls: depending on the amount of compression and the speed of the internet between the two locations, there can be a noticeable lag in the conversation or bits of the call may be lost.  This is more and more likely to happen once a VOIP call is being made between two distant places.

There are a lot of places on the Internet where you can place inexpensive VOIP calls.  Some sites even let you places free calls between two computers but charge to make a call from a computer to a phone, or from a phone to a phone.  Even though the quality is not necessarily better, many people are working on VOIP because the resources required per call are exponentially less than are required for a traditional phone call and therefore the costs associated with VOIP calls are extremely low.