The VOIP Provider Guide

DID
Direct Inward Dialing (DID) is a service of a local phone company (or local exchange carrier) that provides a block of telephone numbers for calling into a company’s private branch exchange (PBX) system. Using DID, a company can offer its customers individual phone numbers for each person or workstation within the company without requiring a physical line into the PBX for each possible connection.

ISDN
Integrated Services Digital Network An international standard for end-to-end digital transmission of voice, data, and signaling. In a videoconference it is a system that provides simultaneous voice, video, and text transmission between individual desktop videoconferencing systems and group (room) videoconferencing systems.

IVR
Interactive Voice Response. A generic term for transaction systems allowing phone callers to use an ordinary telephone to interact with a computer through speech or dialed instructions. Each response by the caller triggers another recorded message until the transaction is completed.

PBX
Private Branch eXchange (also called Private Business eXchange) – is a telephone exchange that is owned by a private business, as opposed to one owned by a common carrier or by a telephone company.

PSTN
Also know as Plain Old Telephone System, this refers to the world’s collection of interconnected public telephone networks designed primarily for voice traffic.

SIP
Session Initiation Protocol.  Used for setting up communications sessions on the Internet, such as telephony, presence, events notification and instant messaging. The protocol initiates call setup, routing, authentication and other feature messages to endpoints within an IP domain.

VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol (also called IP Telephony, Internet telephony, and Digital Phone) – is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or any other IP-based network.  

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 9:03 am and is filed under VOIP Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.