History

  • 1974 - The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) published a paper entitled "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection."Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E. Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 22, No. 5, May 1974 pp. 637-648
  • 1981 - IPv4 is described in RFC-791.
  • 1985 - The National Science Foundation commissions the creation of NSFNET.
  • 1995 - VocalTec releases the first commercial Internet phone software.
  • 1996 -
    • ITU-T begins the standardization of VoIP initially with the H.323 standard.
    • US telecommunication companies ask the US Congress to ban Internet phone technology.
  • 1997 - Level 3 began development of its first softswitch (a term they coined in 1998).
  • 1999 -
    • The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) specification RFC-2543 was released.
    • The first open source SIP PBX ( Asterisk) is created by Mark Spencer of Digium.
  • 2004 - Commercial VoIP service providers proliferate.