there are three different kinds of VoIP. The simple are VoIP telephone handsets that look and work much like traditional telephones, except that instead of being wired to a telephone line, they're either directly connected to your computer (by something like a USB cable) or connected to it by a wireless (Wi-Fi) router. voip meaning You'll find a slightly different kind of VoIP on cellphones (mobile phones). You make and receive mobile VoIP calls much the same as normal cellphone calls but, instead of calls being felt and received on a permanently open line, like a traditional cellphone call, they're broken into packets and sat back and forth—rather like a web page that you're browsing with something like a smart phone.
In other words, they're using packet switching over the cellphone network. A third kind of VoIP is entirely computer based. When you call someone, the VoIP software running on your computer (known as a client) sets up a more or less direct connection (known as a peer-to-peer or P2P) connection with someone else's computer, across the Internet. what does voip stand for You send and receive text messages, voice data, or webcam chat over this direct link. Apart from the initial logging on process, there is no intermediate computer managing the communication between the sender and receiver, which makes this relatively secure compared to other forms of telephone communication. Skype worked this way until a few years ago but now uses a much more centralized cloud-computing system.
To lots of people, using the Net means looking at YouTube videos or buying books from Amazon.com—but both of these things are really about the World Wide Web, not the Internet. The Internet is the worldwide network that links virtually every modern computer on the planet, and it's made up of telephone lines, satellite links, fiber-optic cables, and old-fashioned copper wires. The World Wide Web (all those shopping sites, home videos, and only on you browse from your computer) is just one of the things that the Internet uses; email is another.
The Internet is designed so that it can send all kinds of information, in all kinds of different ways, between the various computers that it connects together, and without any kind of rewiring or redesign. (Technically, this is called the end-to-end principle.) That's why, in the mid-1990s, some technical people were able to figure out how to send telephone calls over the Net, much like any other kind of information. This was the birth of VoIP.
