how does local area voip work?
I go to a school that has the ethernet plugs in there phones, Im curious about how the whole thing works. Like is the phone considered a computer if i called it with a voip softphone?
Not a computer. A host.
Voip phones have IP addresses and subnet masks. They have TCP/IP stacks and communicate over networks using protocols of which Voice Over Internet Protocol is the main one for it.
I suppose you could call it a VoIP Appliance. As a VoiP appliance, the phone is hardware with electronics components that run on embedded “FirmWare”. The VoIP appliance just plugs directly into the network Ethernet cables. If a Softphone were used, then the PC on which the Softphone is installed is connected to the Ethernet cable (through its Ethernet card).
In VoIP networking, there are basically VoIP Servers (or Proxies) and VoIP Clients. Softphones, and hard-phones i.e IP-Phones and ATA’s (analog telephone adapters), are the VoIP Clients that use the servers or proxies to handle the calling set-up and client mapping so that VoIP clients can talk to each other.
Really, Voip client phones not only talk to other VoIP clients on its own network, but if the server is appropriatly configured, calls can also be made to any phone around the world.