This year the VOIP market has picked up. Many corporate have started using VoIP and have realized a large savings of 52-percent or more off their phone bills. Use of wireless VoIP helped hospitals to reduce cost of mobile phones. Technologically VoIP is better than pagers and hence it is getting popular in nursing homes and hospitals.



What are the disadvantages of Voice over Internet Protocol?

VoIP is becoming very popular to business houses but it is still not very popular to residential segment. The qualities of VoIP services are inferior to the quality of call in regular telephone technology due to various reasons.

VOIP technology requires a large amount of data to be compressed and transmitted in a packet format, then uncompressed and delivered, all in a relatively small amount of time. This digitization of analog voice signals takes too long and the callers experience either echo or over-talk.

Regular phone calls function with a delay of no more than ten( 10) milliseconds whereas in the case VOIP the delay is up to 400 milliseconds, meaning that the callers won't hear each other fast enough to make the conversation flow easily. Due to this delay, either callers will hear themselves talking or they will start talking again before they have heard the other person reply. It is true that this delay problem does not occur for each call.

The disadvantages of VOIP are usually acceptable if the callers are using a free service and the calls are for personal in nature. The degradation of voice quality is not acceptable to corporate houses. Apart from delay in voice conversation, IT security network like firewall sometimes failed to route a VOIP call once it is received.

Moreover, if several people use VoIP, bandwidth utilization also increases. Excess use of bandwidth also increases the infrastructural cost.