Introduction

Human voices, in fact all sounds we hear, are analog waveforms. The internet, in fact all modern networks, are digital in nature. To simplify it, a series of analog waveforms, featuring continuously varying sine waves, gets sampled thousands of times a second with each sample then converted to a series of digital ones and zeros. The ones and zeros can then be transmitted over any data network. The trick is to make sure the network has a high enough bandwidth and low enough latency that the digital stream is delivered almost exactly as it was originally sampled.

As it happens, a data rate of 64,000 bits/second is enough to carry a voice. Certainly 300,000,000 (300mb) is much larger than 64,000. Latency is a larger issue, especially when all your kids are playing the latest interactive video games and you are trying to talk to Grandmother. Generally there’s enough bandwidth to accommodate everyone and a number of techniques (like slowing the kids down) exist to allow the voice (and video, which has the same properties, only faster) to transit the internet successfully. Almost every robo-call you get is delivered this way, and a large number of regular calls are also and we can rarely hear the difference.

VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol)

The main technique for sending voice over the internet is VOIP. The basic requirements for running VOIP are a box at your home to plug your regular analog phone system to and a VOIP service that handles setting up the calls, both in and out. If you Google “voip” you’ll get a long list of voip boxes (i.e. Ooma) and voip services (i.e. Vonage). Note that I am making no recommendations.

You may have heard of Google Voice, which is a VOIP-based offering. Certainly you could replace your current land line with it. BUT GV does NOT support 911 calls at all, so unless you have an alternative means to call 911 you probably ought not use it to replace your current landline.

A typical VOIP service can provide you a phone number, and most of the time you can additionally/alternatively import your existing phone number to that service. You’ll typically pay a monthly charge and a per-minute usage charge. Presently I’m testing a service called VOIP.MS. They charge less than a dollar per month for the service including a phone number, and their per-minute charges are less than 0.01, or you can get unlimited calls for $5/mo.

For the box at my house I am testing a Grandstream HT802. It costs much less than $100 from a variety of suppliers and can connect to a variety of VOIP services, i.e. VOIP.MS. It uses a hardwire ethernet connection to your router/switch/ONT.

Managing your own VOIP setup can be a challenge – there’s potentially lots of options that you have to give some thought to. Things like 911 support, voice mail, forwarding, foreign calls and on and on. No doubt there are service offerings that manage all this stuff for you and no doubt they will be more expensive than my voip.ms barebones testing service, i.e. Vonage.

I’ve now been using the VOIP service for over a month and it has worked perfectly thus far. The voice quality is same as what Spectrum (or AT&T) gave me.

Just to give you a idea of what it looks like, here’s a picture.