Voice over IP is a significant technology, however it’s not because it represents any sort of technical advance over traditional voice, but rather because it is disruptive, and changes the game.
In the past, telecom technology was a tightly-controlled, old-boys club, monopolized by large companies able to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars required to be able to play.
What VoIP did was bring telecom into a new arena, the Internet, where open standards and commoditized hardware ruled. Suddenly, the technology became something that anyone could learn about. Coupled with this, the rise of the open-source PBX meant that it was now possible to build a standards-compliant telephone system using nothing more than a server, a network, and a willingness to learn. We wrote the Asterisk bookin part because we wanted to provide a technical guide to those interested in this telephony revolution.
VoIP has changed the world of telecom. It has lowered costs, increased functionality, standardized complex protocols, and is steadily bridging the gap between the human voice and the computer.
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