Recent Developments
The term's scope has been broadened with the advent of the different new communication technologies. In its broadest sense, the terms encompasses phone communication, Internet calling, mobile communication, faxing, voicemail and video conferencing. Telephony's initial idea returns to POTS, (an acronym for "plain old telephone service") technically called the PSTN (public-switched telephone network).
This system is being fiercely challenged by and to a great extent yielding to Voice over IP (VoIP) technology, which is also commonly referred to as IP Telephony and Internet Telephony. IP telephony is a modern form of telephony which uses the TCP/IP protocol popularized by the Internet to transmit digitized voice data. Also, unlike traditional phone service, IP telephony service is relatively unregulated by government. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates phone-to-phone connections, but says they do not plan to regulate connections between a phone user and an IP telephony service provider.Using the Internet, calls travel as packets of data on shared lines, avoiding the tolls of the PSTN. The challenge in IP telephony is to deliver the voice, fax, or video packets in a dependable flow to the user. Much of IP telephony focuses on that challenge.
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