No one expects you to be a telephony guru, that's the whole point of VoiceBus solutions.  However having a template to fit your questions into can help express your needs and help us understand your unique requirements.

We've compiled a list of common telephony terms to facilitate with this:

VoIP

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a general term for a family of transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications over IP networks such as the Internet or other packet-switched networks. Other terms frequently encountered and synonymous with VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, and broadband phone.

Internet telephony refers to communications services — voice, facsimile, and/or voice-messaging applications — that are transported via the Internet, rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The basic steps involved in originating an Internet telephone call are conversion of the analog voice signal to digital format and compression/translation of the signal into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission over the Internet; the process is reversed at the receiving end.

VoIP systems employ session control protocols to control the set-up and tear-down of calls as well as audio codecs which encode speech allowing transmission over an IP network as digital audio via an audio stream. Codec use is varied between different implementations of VoIP (and often a range of codecs are used); some implementations rely on narrowband and compressed speech, while others support high fidelity stereo codecs.

SIP

SIP, the session initiation protocol, is the IETF protocol for VOIP and other text and multimedia sessions, like instant messaging, video, online games and other services.

HD Voice

HD Voice stands for High-Definition Voice, and is also commonly called wideband voice. It is a kind of voice transmission, especially in VoIP systems, whereby higher voice quality is transmitted over a lower bandwidth. The result is a sound of quality close to that of a room conversation.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth refers to how much data you can send through a network or modem connection. It is usually measured in bits per second, or "bps." You can think of bandwidth as a highway with cars travelling on it. The highway is the network connection and the cars are the data. The wider the highway, the more cars can travel on it at one time. Therefore more cars can get to their destinations faster. The same principle applies to computer data -- the more bandwidth, the more information that can be transferred within a given amount of time.<!-- google_ad_section_end -->