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VoIP: Voice over Internet Protocol is a young technology which has some breathtaking economic ramifications. In just a few years, traditional wire-bound telephony will appear to be as anachronistic and a monocle or a steam locomotive.
It can be expected that countries with young economies like Eastern Europe or Africa will largely skip the age of wired telephony altogether. No company will be prepared to make the massive investments required for the dying technology of a traditional telephone system. In Eastern Europe there are many cell phones for every hard wired telephone service. The infrastructure of a wireless network is very much cheaper to build than underground cabling. If households are to be wired at all down the road, the prime purpose of the wires will be data transmission via the internet rather than telephony.
A corporate VoIP network can be set up for just a few hundred dollars these days and this is of particular interest to companies with a high volume of telephone traffic over wired telephone networks or companies, which are planning to replace their existing hard-wired telephone exchange in any event. Telephone traffic will then simply be routed through the intranet instead of the old exchange with dedicated wiring. If remote locations are to be tied into the company telephone exchange, they will simply be connected with each other through a VPN and the internet telephony will be routed through the VPN. Existing phones can simply be tied into this network or else they can be replaced with special VoIP phones.
The major telecommunications providers presently offer complete VoIP solutions. However, these are generally not cheap and tend to be based on a "virtual PBX", which has to be rented from the provider. It is often much cheaper to simply buy a VoIP server and place it inside one's own four walls.
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