Recent LAN and WAN technologies make voice sound good.
Since 1998 when 3Com brought to market the first IP PBX, the enterprise Voice over
IP (VoIP) phenomenon has changed not just telecommunications, but also enterprise
networking. The 3Com® NBX® system ushered in a new era of communications. For the
first time, companies were able to leverage their investments in high performance
local area networks (LANs) to deliver
real-time services such as IP telephony.
In fact, the major standardized innovations in Layer 2 switches and enterprise routers
in the past five years-virtual LAN (VLAN) segmentation, packet prioritization, Power
over Ethernet (PoE), differentiated services, multi-protocol label switching-enhance
converged networking and its delivery of high-quality
audio.
Thousands of references on Google.com, January 2005.