We are all ? or at least an impressive number of us ? going www: either for pleasure or for work, for home businesses or in search of some helpful information, the World Wide Web is becoming significantly, if not even dramatically, employed. Telephony itself is being operated according to Internet formulae. Voice over Internet Protocol ? VoIP ? (although no longer an undertaking of avant-garde in the domain of communication) remains the ?dernier cri? to what concerns high-quality voice transfer and astonishing cost-effectiveness, two attributes adequate enough to attract a king-sized interest in VoIP.



Both customers and Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs) have acknowledged the genuine communication goldmine which is represented by VoIP. Selling voice services as your own private business by means of a call shop can also benefit from these latest improvements in telecommunication. As a plus, a VoIP-based call shop will also convey calls to the regular PSTNs in the same high-quality circumstances and at the same cost-effective rates.

A VoIP-based call shop makes a choice investment opportunity for different types of businessmen. For instance, owners of Internet caf's who want to increase their profits by introducing supplementary services will find it very easy to acquire the essential kit for VoIP telephony. They already have the computers and the Internet connection, so what's left is to obtain the telephones, IP phones or softphones, and a number of apparatuses like displays that show the charge per minute, the time elapsed and the total charge for the entire conversation. The ITSP will also make sure that a SIP-compliant or H.323-compliant gateway is functional, which means that the setup necessary for a voice call (the call setup, the call signaling, the transfer of terminal capabilities, the voice packets streaming, or simpler, the SIP way: the generation, adjustment and termination of telephone sessions) is also ensured.

All these are, in fact, the basic requirements for a VoIP-based call shop to function. And it is not only Internet caf's which can benefit from widening their customer base. Customers of a regular PSTN (public switched telephone network) call shop will also observe an quality improvement and cost reduction of the call shop services they had been used to. The operation is simple, since only an upgrade is necessary so as to shift to a VoIP-based setup.

Businessmen who are just entering the field of VoIP services will find the idea of such a call shop equally attractive, the same as the regular PSTN owners or the net caf's owners find it. The investment costs are low enough to encourage an entrepreneur who is a novice on the VoIP investment market. Moreover, the basic equipment, the implement procedures and the maintenance mechanisms are not highly demanding, and the greatest part of them is obtainable with the assistance of your ITSP.

Finally, a VoIP-based call shop can be hosted by a carrier. By means of a call shop gateway configured to the carrier's gateway, calls can be placed at the hosted call shop without effort and then routed to the carrier's gateway so that the software providing the call display records (charge per minute, time elapsed, total costs) should become operational.

All in all, broadband phone services make a wonderful investment opportunity for all sorts of entrepreneurial initiatives in the field of phone shops. The advantages of Voice over Internet Protocol have really begun to pervade the telecommunication systems. Whether home based, office operational, or a business in itself (see the above discussed situation of phone shops), voice transfer over internet protocol, be it enabled by SIP gateways or by H.323 gateways, be it made possible by means of IP phones, softphones or by regular analog telephones connected to broadband Internet, is preferable due to cost-effectiveness matters and to the quality of the voice transfer. Moreover, to what concerns the manner of payment, both prepaid and postpaid alternatives are possible. The call display records will render visible the actual charge of the entire telephone call to both the customer of the call shop and the call operator, so that no doubt should arise to what concerns the fairness of the payment procedures. In the end, both the customer and the phone shop owner will result as the satisfied beneficiaries of a service exploited to its highest-quality attributes by means of the advancements registered in communication in terms of Internet enabled technologies.