You have probably heard of Voip, seen the commercials for Vonage, and wondered if Voip is reliable enough to use as your house phone. After all, Vonage has only been around a couple of years, and everyone knows that new technology has bugs.

The truth is that you already use Voip yourself. First though, let me tell you what Voip is. You see, Voip stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. We’re gonna get a bit technical here, so you can skip it if you want J

Basically, information gets sent in “packets” of data. Imagine you brother wants to send you an armchair. However, the post office won’t accept such a large mailing, so instead, what he does is breaks it up into pieces and sends you the parts. That is very similar to the way information travels over the internet. They are broken up into parts, and then sent.

Audio files are typically pretty large;  30-40 times the size that a normal webpage is. A normal webpage is probably around 80 kilobytes. But if you store songs on an ipod, you’ll know that each song takes up about 2 megabytes of space- and that’s in an mp3 file! (An mp3 file is typically 1/10 the size of a normal sound file.)

In itself, this is not a problem. Internet connections are blazing fast, and have no problem passing the information. However, unlike a webpage- or the armchair you are going to mail to your brother, in which it does not matter what order the parts arrive, if you try to receive an audio message, with the parts out of order, you will just get a garbled message.

Basically, Voip is the method that was created in order to identify the order of the “packets” of information received. In other words, every time you hear some type of sound off of the internet, it is Voip.

So you tell me, is Voip really all that new?

I have just started this blog in order to write interesting articles on Voip. So a little about me.I actually wrote a short ebook, which you can get simply by siging up to my newsletter at http://www.shouldigetvoip.com/voip-newsletter-signup.html.

I intend to actively put up new and interesting content about voip. Follow Vonage, Sunrocket, Viatalk and the others, put up audio podcasts of my more interesting articles and more.

I am also thinking of putting up a related home network directory for the US, but that’s for later.