How Does Internet Telephony Perform?
Quite well, actually. Seriously, internet telephones rely on a similar network for making phone connections as the one traditional telephone companies have used for years. Every long distance call for decades has gone over a network similar to the internet, if not actually segments of the “real” internet. The difference is that the physical wires connecting your home telephone to your service provider are not the pair of copper wires installed by the traditional telephone company, but your broadband network connection. The chief technical officer for Vonage, Louie Mamakos, says, “it’s telephone service over broadband, not your phone company,” and most people are satisfied with that answer. There are many technical layers under that quick answer, but consumers have accepted cable TV, satellite TV, and cell phones, and they seem to accept that internet telephones reach all the other telephones in the world. It doesn’t matter to users if the calls leave the house over a coax cable from th
