1.How does VoIP affect traditional telephone companies?
Answer:VoIP(Voice over Internet Protocol) phone calls are where the analog voice signals are digitized,sectioned into packets and sent over Internet.
VoIP would affect traditional telephone companies and would lead to more usage of VoIP due to following reasons:

1.VoIP reduces the phone bills as compared to traditional telephones mainly because telephone calls are billed based on minutes whereas VoIP calls are billed per megabyte.VoIP calls are billed per amount of information sent over Internet and not according to time connected to telephone network.

2.Also conference calling,call forwarding are normally charged extra by traditional telephone companies are available for free of charge using VoIP.

3.Able to transmit more than one VoIP call over single broadband connection without need of extra lines.
Thus,traditional telephone companies may find that their biggest customers as their biggest competitors with more use of VoIP as in the case study of H.J.Heinz company.

2.What concerns would you have about communicating over the Internet?
Answer:Concerns of communication over Internet are:

1.VoIP communication needs a high speed Internet connection.If you are trying to place a VoIP call while others are using lot of bandwidth the sound quality of your VoIP call will be affected.

2.Like e-mail spamming,sending commercial message over VoIP is fast and cheap and would lead to companies sending large amount of messages to VoIP customers.

3.Another concern is that it is possible for an attacker to act as another VoIP caller.

4.Major concern using VoIP is confidentiality.Data sometimes travels unencrypted over Internet and it is possible for someone to reconstruct the conversation.

Shreyas.V
1MS07IS094