Answering Service Begins to Embrace VoIP Technology

Todd Cardin of Specialty Answering Service announced today that his company will attend the 3rd annual VoIP Developer Conference in Santa Clara, California August 8-10, 2006.  With VoIP technology becoming more a part of telecommunications, answering services are forced to grow and integrate with change.  Being a twenty year veteran of the answering service business Todd Cardin did not easily embrace broadband phone service.  "I didn't even know what VoIP was at first," Cardin said.  But his company quickly embraced it, becoming one of the first answering services to integrate customers utilizing VoIP services within their pre-existing infrastructure.

Voice over IP (VOIP) refers to the use of the internet protocol (IP) to transfer voice communications in much the same way that web pages and e-mail are transferred. Each piece of voice data is digitized in to chunks and then sent across the Internet (in the case of public VOIP) to a destination server where the chunks are re-assembled. This process happens in real-time so that two or more people can carry on a conversation.

The advantages of VOIP are typically related to cost because it doesn't cost any more to transmit this data across the street as it does across the country. Hence, many consumer VOIP providers are able to offer long-distance service across the US and Canada for a flat fee making them very competitive with the offerings from traditional phone providers. The slightly lower sound quality sometimes associated with VOIP as compared to landlines has proven to not be much of a deterrent.

Some answering services are following Specialty Answering into the VoIP market.  Many are not.  Todd Cardin is not surprised.  "The answering service industry has always been afraid of new things.  Many see VoIP as a threat that will make answering services obsolete.", Cardin said. To the contrary, VoIP should open the doors and actually enhance the answering service experience.  It seems to be a perfect match as a growing number of answering service customers seem to be internet based companies.