More VoIP gateway products have become available to customers as the popularity of VoIP as a stable telephone service has increased. Leading gateway vendors include Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and Mediatrex Telecom.
These gateways can either consist of hardware products or software products. The hardware gateways tend to cost more than software gateways and can be purchased as a stand alone box. They tend to be viewed as more reliable and do not consume computer power.
There are many functional options available for gateway products, including fax, STN, and PBX enabled products that offer more than just simple call handling.
At the lower end of the market, a basic VoIP gateway comes with a phone jack, Ethernet router and firewall can be purchased for under two hundred dollars. To offer basic functionality they have ports for the phone jack, the broadband modem, and the computer or network connection. These low end VoIP gateways targets the home user and small business owner.
At the mid range of gateways, additional functionality such as signal encryption and voice compression is offered to ensure security and efficient bandwidth usage.
At the higher end of the market are VoIP gateways that cost several thousand dollars and are widely used by telephone carriers and large companies. These systems have sophisticated functionality such as interactive voice response systems for automated voice response functions, and they can carry thousands of simultaneous telephone conversations. They also offer other functions like conference calling and call recording.
VoIP gateways are being continuously improved with even faster protocol translation speeds and support for additional VoIP standards and protocols as they become popular in the market. Many of these improvements are software based and therefore can be sent to customers very quickly and cheaper in the form of a software upgrade.
One can expect to see many more enhancements and improvements before VoIP and VoIP gateways can be considered a matured and saturated market. It will allow VoIP networks to build, expand and upgrade their networks and provide better quality and even more inexpensive calls.
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Author: Monty Mcginn. At voip.besttipsonline.com you can get choosing the best VoIP solution, as well as information on VoIP requirements.
