VOIP Technology: The History

In less than two decades, Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP (VoIP) has revolutionized the telecommunications industry. While mobile phones have made the headlines as they gradually evolved from expensive bricks to pocket supercomputers, in the background VoIP has helped to knock down barriers in international communication, providing a genuine alternative to telephone calls made using traditional telecoms infrastructure and providing near-universal access to cheap calls for anyone with a computer and an internet connection.

Early Days

The first recognizable VoIP software was launched back in the early days of the modern internet in 1995. Though primitive by today’s standards, VocalTec’s ‘Internet Phone’ service was revolutionary for its time. A hit among early adopters, Internet Phone’s success encouraged networking hardware providers such as Cisco and Lucent to develop their own corporate VoIP products, designed to replace outdated business telephony solutions. Domestic users, unfortunately, were hampered by the technological limitations of the time; slow connection speeds and poor quality audio codecs were serious obstacles that needed to be overcome before VoIP could make the jump to the mainstream.

The Broadband Revolution 

The arrival of affordable broadband internet connections in most western cities by the early 2000s was crucial to the proliferation of VoIP and internet telephony services. For the first time, users had sufficient bandwidth to use higher quality codecs that approached the fidelity of normal telephone calls and could run VoIP services concurrently with browsers, instant messenger programs and even games without their internet connections grinding to a halt. The release of newer versions of Microsoft Windows and Mac OS helped to overcome early hardware and compatibility headaches, withplug-and-play headsets taking much of the hassle out of online voice chat. The stage was set for a revolution; all that was needed was the right software to bring VoIP to the masses.

Enter Skype

Skype first came to the public’s attention with the launch of beta software in August 2003 and quickly established itself as the de facto standard for internet voice communications. The Skype application allowed users to make computer-to-computer calls for free and also included a rudimentary instant messenger program to allow text communication. The company rapidly rolled out new services that allowed users to call landlines and mobile phones from Skype at greatly reduced costs and by the end of 2005 had integrated video chat into its software. With the fundamentals in place, Skype was firmly established as the market leader for cheap calls online and its service was seen as a benchmark for other operators.