There are quite a few different flavours of VoIP, according to Mike Eagle, general manager of the Federation of Communication Services.
Mr Eagle explained that there are fairly simple services of the Skype-type variety, which are fairly unsophisticated and "in terms of the quality, not very reliable".
That, he observed, would not be a business grade VoIP service, wireless communication device users may be interested to learn.
"So I think in terms of business services, you've got essentially two main propositions - hosted VoIP and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) trunking," he said.
SIP trunking is a way of replacing ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) functionality, according to Mr Eagle.
"Whereas with hosted, as the name implies, the service is hosted in the core of the communications provider that offers the service and that offers you a lot of sophisticated functionality that you'd only get via installing a reasonably high-level traditional PBX (Private Branch Exchange)."
Posted by Simon Jones