"The advantage is obvious: I can call my mate in Sydney and chat for the price of a local London call."
John Diamond, journalist. The Times
In 1973, researcher Danny Cohen's Network Voice Protocol was first used on ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), where it allowed research sites to talk with each other over the computer network. For many years afterward, however, sending your voice over the Internet was the preserve of researchers, geeks, and early computer gamers.
But in 1995 a company called VocalTec released a piece of software it called Internet Phone. Designed for Microsoft Windows, it turned the speaker's voice into computer data, compressing it enough to send it in real time over a modem connection to another computer on the Internet.
Many people suddenly became interested in Internet Telephone, for one simple reason—it was cheap. In the United States, for example, the local call to connect to the Internet was often free, whereas long-distance calls were costly.
As Internet speeds improved and other companies started to offer similar services, making telephone calls across the Internet gained a generic name: Voice over Internet Protocol, commonly known as VolP. VoIP is now extremely popular. Skype, one of the best known VoIP companies, has clocked up more than a hundred billion minutes of calls between its users since 2003 when the service started.
