Internet Phone/VoIP TERMS & ACRONYMS
Fancy Words & Jargon…What it all Means
One of the things that drives people crazy about the tech world are all the acronyms & technical terms. If you’re a techie at heart it probably doesn’t bother you that much. But for a lot of people tech jargon can be confusing, intimidating, and can even cause some to stay away altogether.
Unfortunately, the world of internet phones isn’t that much better. But the good news is that once you familiarize yourself with the basic terms you’ll be set. The following is a glossary of the most relevant terms you should know when it comes to internet phones. These are terms which you might come across if you decide to get an internet phone; especially if you set it up yourself.
Glossary
ATA – Analog terminal adaptor.
This is the device that you plug a regular phone into and it converts it to the internet. Many providers will lease or sell you this device. You can also buy it yourself online or at a specialized computer store. They cost under a hundred dollars and Linksys is one of the famous brands.
BYOD – Bring Your Own Device
Many internet phone companies allow you to use your own ATA (internet phone adapter), as opposed to renting one of theirs. This means you buy internet phone service from them but you do the set up yourself. This gives you more control over your phone and allows for more options. You can also use your ATA device again if you change providers
Codec
Software (or hardware) that transforms data among digital signal formats. It can also provide COmpression or DECompression. In other words, a codec will transform your voice data to adapt to the speed of your internet connections. For example, if you have lousy internet you can change your codec to improve your sound quality – and you can do this yourself if you set up your own adapter.
Dedicated Internet Phone
This type of phone is strictly dedicated to internet phone usage only. It has a mini built-in computer and cannot be used through a landline. It has many features and is best suited for a business environment.
Gateway
As far as this website use is concerned – it is the bridge between the internet phone world and the plain old telephone system world. It is managed by the company you buy your internet phone service from. The location of this server is important – some services like Fring for iPhone have their gateways in the UK which makes this service unworkable for many in the Americas. The other thing that these servers have configured on them is the codecs.
GSM
A high compression codec which is similar to the G.729 codec. The GSM codec however uses up more bandwidth. It is hard to find, but it’s usually always free
G.711
This is the standard low compression codec. It is best used for high speed internet connections and is usually the default codec for most internet phones.
G.729
This is the standard high compression codec. It is best used for slow internet connections and you usually have to request it. It is especially useful for travelling and for unpredictable internet connections.
Hard Phone
A phone that requires physical equipment to operate. For example, certain types of internet phones require an actual phone to work. These phones may require a computer and software for the initial installation but generally after that they operate without a computer running.
IP address
Every device that connects to the internet has a numeric address associated with it. This address lets it communicate with other devices. All the routers provide the direction giving abilities to packets – chunks of data – by the use of these addresses.
When you type in www.google.com into your browser, the browser looks up (through a rather large index) what the IP address is and requests data based on the IP address numbers. The format of these numbers is in the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. As the Internet has grown so huge over the last few years, there is a new system that uses a different format of numbers but for now, the 4 groups of 3 digits works just fine.
ITSP
(Internet Telephone Service Provider) A company that provides you with internet phone service. This can vary from a basic service such as a phone number to the whole package – phone number, tech support and equipment etc.
MAC address
Unique identifier that every network device has (machine address).
Managed Network
A network that has a device, usually a specialized router, which controls internet traffic.
Packet
A packet is a little chunk of data that gets routed around the internet. It is encapsulated in a container which has address and protocol information in it that lets each packet be self-contained. Each packet can be routed individually. For the most part they follow the same stream, but if they do get broken up they can find an alternate path. If you are talking on a cell phone or internet phone and a little slice (or more) of a word is missing – this means a packet or two didn’t make it.
POTS or PSTN
A lot of people refer to the regular, traditional phone system as the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS), while those who want to be slightly more positive use the proper term – Public Switched Telephone Network.
Protocol
Rules defining the format and transmission of data.
Quality of Service (QoS)
Is a standard that the Electronic Engineers came up with to deal with the problem of voice packets competing with other packets like html (web) and email, etc. It gives priority to the voice (or gaming, to be more precise) packets as these are more time sensitive. You can set QoS up on your VoIP router or some wireless routers to let voice packets go first. There is a setting in windows to turn on QoS but it is basically useless as nobody really uses it. This is great to help improve internet phone sound quality, especially if you have lousy internet.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
The protocol that has for the most part taken over the world of internet telephones. There are other protocols like H.323 which was very popular 10 years ago, and IAX which is an open-source protocol that is popularly used at a higher level – e.g. getting VoIP servers to talk to each other. Basically, for the average user, you can forget about all this, but in the interest of being accurate I include this definition so you can become the cocktail-party expert that I promised. So, if some know-it-all, who knows everything about VoIP, tries to stump you by asking what protocols you are using, you, without taking a moment hesitation, can look dumbfounded that he would ask you such a pedestrian question and answer, “Well [or duh - if you want to be ruder], SIP like the rest of the world”.
Soft Phone
A software-based phone. It still requires a computer, but the phone is built into the software so that the calling is done on a virtual screen. It can also operate over a Smart Phone.
STUN
(Session Transversal Utilities For NAT). Sometimes internet phones are hidden from the internet by the router. The router has a public address (its IP address) and internet packets go there. But sometimes they get confused and don’t make it past the router to the internet phone. So STUN was created so that your internet phone could tell an outside server where it was located and that would help the voice packets find their way home.
VoIP
The abbreviated term for “Voice over Internet Protocol”. For the most part VoIP is just another name for Internet Phone.
Wild Network
A network where there is nothing managing packets (the little chunks of data that scurry around the internet and your home network), and they all just compete with one another.
