Translating voice calls between digital for the Internet and analogue for telephone systems is a challenging task, and that is the task that VoIP gateways perform by switching the calls between analogue and digital. Directing calls to specific users is also a function performed by the gateways. Translation from one VoIP protocol into a different protocol is another function of the gateways. This enables compatibility between VoIP systems and devices. Because of all of these benefits it is easy to see why VoIP gateways are highly recommended for any VoIP service.



More VoIP gateway products have become available to customers as the popularity of VoIP as a stable telephone service has increased. Mediatrex Telecom and Cisco System are two examples of manufacturers that produce leading VoIP gateway systems.

These gateways can either consist of hardware products or software products. Hardware based VoIP gateways are available as a stand alone box and are more expensive than software based ones. They do not put additional load on existing servers and are generally believed to be more reliable than the software ones.

Buyers of VoIP gateways can select from products that offer numerous phone, fax machine, PBX and STN support capabilities.

At the lower end of the market, a basic VoIP gateway comes with a phone jack, Ethernet router and firewall can be purchased for under two hundred dollars. To offer basic functionality they have ports for the phone jack, the broadband modem, and the computer or network connection. They are suitable for a home or a small office.

A mid level gateway offers additional interfaces and features such as security capabilities like encryption and network voice compression.

At the higher end of the market are VoIP gateways that cost several thousand dollars and are widely used by telephone carriers and large companies. They support thousands of channels for advanced voice services, such as IVR - Interactive Voice Response - that allows callers to select an option from a voice menu. Other advances features are voice recording and conference calls.

VoIP gateways are being continuously improved with even faster protocol translation speeds and support for additional VoIP standards and protocols as they become popular in the market. Many of these improvements are software based and therefore can be sent to customers very quickly and cheaper in the form of a software upgrade.

One can expect to see many more enhancements and improvements before VoIP and VoIP gateways can be considered a matured and saturated market. The end user benefits from these improvements because quality and range of services increase while overall call costs tend to be constantly driven downwards.