Price and efficiency are the two most recognizable advantages of VoIP technology. While it's unlikely that the FCC will come along and deliberately impede the efficiency this system permits, it's a shadowy possibility that fees and surcharges may eventually be applied to VoIP technology. However, the increasingly common adoption of VoIP by both businesses and consumers goes a long way towards telling the FCC that we are all tired of being stuck with unreasonable calling costs in the first place.

Why does the VoIP architecture allow for such cheaply placed calls? The answer is that VoIP uses the same IP standards that are in use whenever you send an e-mail. Because the system is based on a set of universal protocols that transcend national borders, it makes no difference whether you're sending your e-mail to someone on Main Street, USA or in Madagascar. The same applies for telephone calls placed through that same system, which is how VoIP operates.

Why VoIP Is More Efficient

The other primary selling point of VoIP technology is its outstanding efficiency, which permits an exponentially greater amount of data to flow back and forth over the wires. The basis of this efficiency is rooted in packet switching, a data management solution that's far superior to the old method of circuit switching, which has been in use for more than a century now. While circuit switching (so named for its two-way communications channel) relies on "dedicated" lines to move data back and forth, packet switching frees up resources as they're needed.

On a two-way telephone call, 99 percent of the time only one person is speaking at any given moment. Thus, only half of the network's total capacity is in use, as there's clearly enough space to accommodate two voices at once. Problem is, such a conversation would be totally unintelligible. Nevertheless, that space gets wasted on every analog network. Packet-switching networks, by contrast, can allocate space on an ad hoc basis since they rely on fixed packets of information that are cut to fit the capacities of their fiber-optic wires.