It's cheaper than the conventional system, and that makes the technology compelling.
Jeff Pulver used to spend long hours in his basement hunched over his ham radio. The hobby was fun, but geeky.That may have prepared Pulver for a more significant epiphany, which came to him in 1995.
By then Pulver was a computer-systems administrator on Wall Street. He was home sick one day and surfing the Web when he came across a computer program designed to transmit voice over the Internet, offered free by the Israeli firm VocalTec. Pulver downloaded the software and donned his headset. Soon he was speaking with many of his old buddies from his ham-radio days, who had also caught on to voice software. They had even transferred their ham-radio monikers to the Internet. The voice quality was poor and the software cumbersome, but Pulver was hooked.
The idea was breathtakingly simple: when it comes to the Internet, voice is just another form of data. Once you accept that premise, suddenly the vast networks of telephone wires and switches dedicated to carrying phone calls seem redundant. Instead, why not just take our conversations, turn them into little bundles of digital data, and send them out over the Internet? Each packet would, like e-mail, wend its way from server to server until it arrived on the other side of cyberspace at its destination—which could be a telephone (but one that could plug into the Internet) or a computer. Pulver wasted little time. He left his job and started proselytizing full time.
In the years since, converts to what's technically known as voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, have been growing quickly. Vonage, a company that Pulver helped start, has been one of the big winners.
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