The difference between old landline phone calls, cellphone calls, VoIP and calls made through social media sites
In: Technology
I’ll give it a shot.
Back in the day old landline calls came to your house over dedicated copper wires. These even ran a little bit of current which would ring the phone, which was why hard phones like that could work without electricity – they had a little bit of electricity to them already. Old phones had microphones and speakers which worked with electromagnets to produce analog signals that came over the copper wire.
Cellphones are essentially two way radios that work from local cellular towers. Network speeds like 2G, 3G etc. refer to the frequencies that are used to transmit the signals through the air. Your cell phone connects to a nearby cell tower, and as you move around your signal gets handed off from tower to tower (which explains why calls get dropped.)
VOIP are straight up digital calls over the internet. Your voice gets converted into digital packets and routed over the internet. You can use a VOIP “box” like Vonage which may plug a regular phone into it for at home use. Or you can even use a VOIP app on your phone. This app would place calls using a WiFi network on your phone, or if you were out and about, it could even use your phone’s data network. In this case, though, the VOIP app on your phone would encode the audio into digital data before sending it onwards.
I’m not sure what social media sites you’re referring to, but most likely those are also simply VOIP calls just with a dedicated client.
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