VoIP: How it Works, Why to Use it - VoIP Issues and Popular Programs
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Emergency calls can get a tricky for VoIP. Traditional phone lines make emergency calls easy. Each area in the US has an area code, which narrows the phone call down to a small part of a state. The first three digits narrow your location down to a city, then the last four digits pinpoint your location. VoIP can't do this, which makes emergency calls a lot trickier. VoIP use mainly IP addresses and not phone numbers to communicate. You can't pinpoint a location via an IP address. Making it even harder, IP addresses sometimes aren't static; each time you connect you get a different IP address.
If you use your laptop or PDA to call people on VoIP, you are even worse off. Not only is it hard to located IPs, but now you are taking your phone calls from all over the place. You may travel to different cities on business trips and change the location your emergency calls are passed through.
Solutions are being worked on and much progress has been made in the last year on this, mainly with pressure from the government. On home-based phones, companies have their users register their phone numbers with a location in case an emergency happens. Another idea that would work with any VoIP phone is to include geographic information in the headers of the packets.
The most popular and easiest program is Skype. It is a computer-based solution that only requires a computer, speakers, microphone and an Internet connection. It easily passes any filters or firewalls on the connection. It is a great way to talk to people for free. Many people overseas use this to talk to people back home. It is popular solution for soldiers overseas that wish to talk to their friends and family.
Skype is very simple to set up and runs on many different platforms. The Pocket PC version is really handy; I can call people on my cell phone and not have it cost anything -- and not use my minutes for my cell phone when I'm at home connected to my Wi-Fi. There are a few other good VoIP free computer-based programs, but Skype is by far the best and easiest to use. If you want to call an actual land line phone instead of a computer-based phone, you can get access to that for merely $30 a year. This is about what I as well as many people around the country pay per month and doesn't include charges for international calls.
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