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For those of us who weren’t born with an innate knowledge of how to program a VCR, new technology can be overwhelming and intimidating. One of the most difficult things novices face is not being able to understand the vocabulary associated with a given technological advancement. If you’ve been struggling with voip terminology, here’s a quick and dirty field guide to help you understand the most important terms.

Aside from cheaper calling, what exactly does voip stand for? Voice over IP, or more colloquially, phone calls that travel over the internet, instead of “regular” phone lines. The key to understanding the difference between voip internet phone calls and traditional phone calls lies in two words: analog and digital.

Think of an analog signal as a wave of sound, where small changes in the way the wave is shaped and how it moves can have a big impact. Squeezing the wave together will make a louder sound. If the wave is tall, you’ll get a lower sound and higher pitched noises will have short wave heights. If the wave is changed during transmission, it may be difficult to understand what you’re hearing. Analog signals are also greedy, in that they do a good job of tying up transmission resources.

Digital signals, on the other hand, take that wave and turn the information into discrete values that can be disassembled for more efficient transport. The translated signal is chopped up and encapsulated into tiny, fast moving packets that travel over internet connections. Not only do digital signals take up less room, but more information can be sent at the same time. In order to make everything sound right at the other end, the packets are tagged, so that when they reach their destination, they can easily reassemble themselves in the right order.

Bandwidth is also key to having successful voip calls; you need to have enough. Bandwidth is a measure of how much information can be transmitted over a connection in a certain amount of time. Internet connections have both upstream speeds (for uploading files, including voice traffic) and downstream speeds (for when you download information or receive voice traffic). 90 kbps, or kilobytes per second, in both the up and downstream direction, is the minimum speed required for good sound quality. Most broadband connections, which are faster than older dial-up connections, will be able to handle that speed with no problem.

There are a number of ways to make voip calls, depending on the equipment you use to do so. PC-to-PC calls involve both parties sitting at their computers with a microphone and speaker setup, while using a software program to connect to each other. Historically, it costs nothing to talk, aside from the cost of equipment and the internet connection. In the beginning of voip communication, this was the only way to do it.

Today, there are other options, including PC-to-phone, and phone-to-phone. You can use a PC setup on one end, but dial out to someone with a regular phone, generally for a nominal fee. It’s also possible to make phone-to-phone calls without using a computer at all. In this case, a special device, called a voip internet phone adapter, is connected to a traditional phone. When this type of call is made, the analog signals generated by a standard phone are translated to digital form by the adapter.

Which brings us to the end of this installment of the Field Guide. In the next segment, we’ll talk about the equipment that’s normally used in a voip setup, see typical examples of what it looks like, and learn to identify the various parts of a voice over IP phone system and how they fit together.