The softphone option from a carrier is a big differentiator with various VoIP service providers. I use a simple softphone from CounterPath Corporation called X-Lite. Actually my carry pre-configures the softphone to work with their Voip services. This is typical from many carriers. They will customer brand their softphone with their own logos, but most or a lot of the voip vendors are actually using a X-Lite platform.

It provides you a simple interface , dial pad you can click on, use the numbers on your keyboard to call someone.

A softphone itself is simply a software application that runs on your PC for making telephone calls over the Internet rather than using a dedicated piece of phone hardware. The appearance of the softphone looks like a dial pad of a real phone, but it also can store contacts, allow for redial features, conference calling (if provided by the service provider) and other display panel features. The typical application is to use a good telephone headset. I would recommend a USB headset for Voip calls which connects directly to a USB port on your PC. Alternatively there are some headsets that have a two plug option for the microphones and speakers jacks on the PC. I find the USB headsets to work best, like on of the better Logitec ones you can find from Walmart to Bestbuy.

My experience is the extra $5/mo for the softphone pays off tremendously over cell phone calls and the quality seems to be getting better everyday. What of course is great about VoIP services is you usually can take your phone set-up with you and plug it into any existing Ethernet network. The softphone allows you to not hassle with bringing the phone and ATA adapter and power plug, etc and just run the phone right off the PC. So what you have really is a PC phone which is convenient since you may be traveling already with your PC. Also since most laptop PCs have built in wireless all you need to do is grab a wireless connection and call using your softphone this way. No struggle to find a LAN /Ethernet port to hook into at a hotel. Just jump on the Internet wirelessly.

What is really cool is you can accept and receive inbound calls as well. With my softphone and VoiP provider both my IP phone at home or the office will ring and also the softphone at the same time. In my case my wife could be calling on the softphone at home, and becuase my carrier provides this softphone option, I can make concurrent calls on the softphone. “Really Neat.” I do not have to concern myself that my wife is using the phone while traveling, I always know another line is available.

This softphone I detail has nothing to do with Instant Messenger services that often embed in their tools a PC-to-PC call feature. Skype, Vonage, Google Talk, Yahoo IM , etc are all internet telephony providers in their own way, but their softphones essentially are not inter-operable to receive PC-PC calls. You would have to call an existing telephone number defined and associated with these vendors, and calls would be made through the VoiP providers in combination with the public switched telephone network (PSTN), even though they may be SIP protocol phones or proprietary protocol or jabber based (like Google). Sorry for that use of technical acronyms.

What you can do with my carrier is select the compression level. Compressing in my opinion lessens the perfomance of the voice quality, but often it seems to work better. I get a sense that this is because it needs less bandwidth or packets to send the same information. When sending less packets over the public Internet, this probably results in better latencies and low latencies are what you are striving for when you are doing VoIP over the Internet. Low packet loss and low latencies are key as Internet calls are really indeterministic. there is no deterministic transmission, and no guarantees that packets are not lost and have to be retransmitted. Voice is real time and compression seems to help. At least that has been my findings. If you have a solid Tier 1 bandwidth connection like with a T1 line, which many businesses have, then putting stuff onto and pulling down packets on a call may perform much better than wireless connections or poor performing Cable and DSL networks.

A typical softphone has all standard telephony features (Diredct Number Dial, Mute functions, DTMF dialing, Flash, Hold, Call Transfer etc) and a lot of new ones like Video, Wideband Audio and more. Typical codecs settings are G.711, GSM or iLBC. Softphone vendors may offer more codecs and different feature sets to adhere to their platforms.

I hope this gave some overview and understanding although I know I jumped into some technical mumbo jumbo that may be a bit confusing to some. Rest assured if you are getting residential or business VoIP service, a softphone is a great option. I would recommend it. Plus when you show you Mom your softphone she’ll think you are a PC genius and she’ll brag to all her friends about how PC literate you are. LOL.

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