Telecommunication efforts have been around since the early 1800s, beginning with the telegraph. The first working telegraph was introduced in 1816 by Francis Ronalds. The first telephone prototypes were developed in 1854 by Antonio Meucci. Twenty-two years later, in 1876, Alexander Bell was awarded the first US patent for the invention of the telephone. There have been many disputes of who was the first person to invent the telephone. Rotary phones were the longest lasting physical design for the modern phone. Around 1960 the touch tone version of the phone was introduced and that stay as the current version for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). In 1973 cell phones were created and that has been the new main way of telecommunication.
One of the newest advancements in telecommunication is Voice over IP (VoIP). Many businesses have decided to switch to VoIP from POTS lines. The article on https://www.megapath.com/blog/blog-archive/what-is-voip/ further explains how VoIP converts voice to compressed digital signals known as IP packets. Some of the earliest examples of VoIP was Yahoo messenger and Skype which was mostly used through computers. With the increases in bandwidth and other technological advancements, VoIP has become accessible over many different devices. VoIP is easy to install and also has high global availability. Many businesses also find that VoIP is more cost effective and provides more flexibility. Companies can be able to get more features at a cheaper price while not sacrificing voice quality. While businesses might have been the first to recognize the potential of VoIP, this service has grown with residential use. While cell phones remain the main telecommunication method in most households, VoIP has replacement many residential POTS line that requires at home phone. Most cable providers offer VoIP as the home phone option when getting a bundle package of phone, internet, and TV. Cell phone providers have also adopted the option to use Wifi Calling (another type of VoIP) to reduce cellular usage. This has also helped to provide better phone coverage in area’s that don’t have good cellular coverage.
While VoIP has many advantages there are some disadvantages to the service. One of the major disadvantages of VoIP service is that it is depended on an internet connection. If you have an outage of your internet service than your voice service will be affected by this as well. While this may not be a huge issue for residential homes, this will certainly be a problem with businesses that will not be able to just use cells phone for their daily operations. Also, with residential homes, you may not be able to use emergency service if you are experiencing internet outages. Another issue with VoIP has to do with possible latency issues. Latency is the delay before a transfer of data begins following instruction for its transfer. This tends to not be as much of an issue as much with better internet service and coverage. Even with some of the disadvantages VoIP still is a very good service that should have long term staying power.
