VoIP - technical definition

Referring to voice communications over the public Internet or any packet network employing the TCP/IP protocol suite. Specifically, VoIP operates in datagram mode, employing the Internet Protocol (IP) for addressing and routing, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for host-to-host data transfer between application programs, and the Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP) for end-to-end delivery services.VoIP also typically employs sophisticated predictive compression algorithms, such as low delay code excited linear prediction (LD-CELP), to mitigate issues of latency and jitter over a packet-switched network. See also IP, jitter, latency, LD-CELP, RTP, and UDP.