VoIP Service Requirements

It's VoIP, the latest technology craze. Switch your phones to broadband digital to use the Internet to bypass expensive long-distance providers. Individuals and businesses can slash phone costs by 50 percent or more, with little or no loss of quality.

What do you need to get started?

1. A high-speed Internet connection: A multiple channel connection with bandwidth greater than 2 Mbps. Cable, DSL and T1 or T3 services are all broadband.  The link you choose will depend upon availability, your budget and the amount of telephone traffic you anticipate.

2. A VOIP box: An adapter that lets you connect your phones to the network.

3. An account with a VoIP provider: You must sign up with a company like Vonage that provides real-time, two-way voice communication using the Internet protocol.

4. Wi-Fi enabled phone or voice-enabled Wi-Fi PDA: To use some of the basic services, you could get away with just your PC, an Internet connection, your speakers and a microphone. However, most users are accustomed to cell phones, expect more portability than can be found in a VoIP soft phone loaded on a laptop and want some kind of handheld broadband handset.

However, there's more to consider than just the equipment. VOIP is just as vulnerable to hackers as other digital networking technologies but it's just far less protected, which may not matter to the home user, but can expose businesses to great risk.

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is an IP telephony signaling protocol used for voice over IP calls. SIP is especially suited to integrated voice-data applications. It uses edge-style servers, similar to FTP, e-mail and HTTP, to initiate connections between users. Unfortunately, SIP is a very weak protocol.

Because most VOIP traffic over the Internet is unencrypted, anyone with network access can listen in on conversations. Hackers are able to trick protocols into delivering information into their hands. If you use VoIP for business, your customer’s private information might be stolen in a heartbeat: credit card, bank account, and social security numbers, all in the hands of some high-tech thief.  Then there’s denial of service. In the same way that a Web site can be inundated by false requests and reduced to immobility, your phone line could be jammed.  A malicious prankster could also make your phone ring continuously.

VoIP Quality of Service (QoS) and security are critical concerns that must be solved before large scale VoIP service adoption occurs.