VoIP phone

VoIP phones can be simple software-based softphones or purpose-built hardware devices that appear much like an ordinary telephone or a cordless phone. Traditional PSTN phones are used as VoIP phones with analog telephone adapters (ATA). Two combined signal-and-power wired cable interfaces are in common use to communicate between computer networks (or computers) and physically separate VoIP phones: USB and Power over Ethernet. The latter is preferred in industry such as large scale call centers or PBX replacement applications... A VoIP phone or application may have many features an analog phone doesn't support, such as e-mail-like IDs for contacts that may be easier to remember than names or phone numbers, or easy sharing of contact lists among multiple accounts. Generally the features of VoIP phones follow those of Skype, Google Voice and other PC-based phone services... A competing view is that as mainstream operating systems become better at voice applications with appropriate Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees and 5G handoff (IEEE 802.21 etc.) becomes available from outdoor wireless carriers, netbooks and smartphones will simply become the dominant interfaces. iPhone, Android and the QNX OS used in 2012-and-later BlackBerry phones are generally capable of VoIP performance even on small battery-charged devices. ... the smartphone becomes the dominant VoIP phone because it works both indoors and outdoors and shifts base stations/protocols easily to trade off access costs and call clarity and other factors personal to the user, and the PoE/USB VoIP phone is thus the transitional device. [VoIP phone. Wikipedia]