voip means voice over internet protocol. Internet protocol is the protocol you use everyday to access the world wide web www or as we commonly call it THE INTERNET (a network of numerous networks).Well the developers of the www never thought they would use these networks for transporting voice, they were primarly intended for data. But as technology progressed and convergence became the “IN THING”, customers started demanding everything on everything. I mean today anyone would like to use a phone as a pc, a pc as a phone ,being able to make calls from ur pc, being able to use your pc for video conferencing and hell lot of things like that. So voip is converting voice into data packets and sending them then on the existing internet backbone. Because voice packets are converted into data, they will be carried on the internet as normal data packets. I hope this makes the picture a bit clear for you.