Technology, standards and challenges

As already mentioned, the traditional PSTN telephone infrastructure has been built up over the last one hundred years or so and has developed into a highly reliable voice communications system. In contrast, VoIP is a relatively new technology with a fledgling architecture that is built on inherently less reliable data networks. This means that there are therefore justifiable concerns around the extent to which it is deployed. The purpose of this section is to examine the underlying protocols and technologies used in VoIP and to discuss the potential challenges inherent in their deployment.