With the advent of widespread broadband Internet connections, consumers are discovering what businesses have known for a while. Voice over IP telephony, or VoIP as it is known, can be a viable and cost effective alternative to the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS). As VoIP upstarts are popping up everywhere, most notably Vonage, Packet8 and Skype, even the big Internet Service Providers are offering voice over IP packages to their residential subscribers
Why is everyone on about xml?
In the new world of IP, what looks like a telephone handset is in fact a computer. If its an Alcatel IP handset then its a dumb terminal driven by a presentation server and if its a Cisco IP handset, its more or less a PC. The only restriction is the size and type of the display. In both cases the telephone interface is a web browser and as fashion accessory the IP telephone can sit where you the PC cant.