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VoIP Gateway: What is VoIP?
Voice-over-Internet-Protocol is a packet-based technology for transmitting digitized voice over an Ethernet/IP network. Because many businesses deliver the packetized voice traffic across the Internet to lower the phone bill, VoIP is sometimes called Internet Telephony. VoIP technology, or packet-based voice, underlies such recent developments as unified communication (UC). Related terms include
network transformation—referring to carriers that migrate to All-IP network service delivery—as well as
real-time communication, since voice transmission is especially sensitive to network issues as delay and jitter (variance in delay).
A VoIP gateway—a.k.a. analog telephone adapter (ATA)—is a networking device that converts a traditional (legacy) phone signal (analog or digital) into a (digitized) packet-based, Internet Protocol (IP) communication stream. The gateway serves as the conversion point between Time Division Multiplexed (TDM) telephone network and an IP-based network such as the Internet or private corporate LAN or WAN.
Traditional business-class telephony services include PRI, E1 and T1 trunks, plain old telephone service (POTS) interfaces like FXS and FXO (learn more about FXS/FXO technology) as well as BRI and PRI interfaces for integrated services digital network (ISDN). (Glossary of telecom terms.) The gateway converts voice received from the PBX into IP packets suitable for transmission over a data network. Similarly, the gateway re-formats the stream of incoming IP data packets for use by the PBX system.
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