More and more businesses today have their receive phone service
through Internet instead of local phone company lines. Many
businesses are also using their internal local and wide-area
network infrastructure to replace legacy enterprise telephone
networks. This migration to a single network carrying voice and
data is called convergence, and it's revolutionizing the world of
telecommunications by slashing costs and empowering users. The
technology of families driving this convergence is called VoIP, or
Voice over IP.

VoIP has advanced Internet-based telephony a viable solution,
piquing the interest of companies small and large. The primary
reason for migrating to VoIP is cost, as it equalizes the costs of
long distance calls, local calls, and e-mails to fractions of a
penny per use. But the real enterprise turn-on is how VoIP empowers
businesses to mold and customize telecom and datacom solutions
using a single, cohesive networking platform. These business
drivers are so compelling that legacy telephony is going the way of
the dinosaur, yielding to Voice over IP as the dominant enterprise
communications paradigm.