What has Voice-over-Internet Protocol done for you lately? You may have saved a few bucks off your last call to your friends vacationing in the Carribean, or your relatives in Canada, or your fiancé currently working in Southeast Asia. But did you know that VoIP is actually being used to save lives?

Yes, our beloved technology that lets us communicate with the rest of the world over data packets is being used in medical applications. Well, it’s not the VoIP that we know of, meaning your run of the mill plug-in USB phone or Skype. Doctors across the globe are exchanging live information and assistance through video-calling via the Internet even as they perform surgery!

Talk about high tech!

This is yet another application of VoIP in this evolving—or rather revolving—world of ours. I say evolving because first there was data communications, when the first telegraphs sent out Morse code. Then there was voice, with the telephone and the radio. Then it was back to data, at the onset of the Internet and bulletin board systems. And now we’re back to voice. It seems like it’s just a continuing cycle, but the technology is getting better and better everyday, for today we can communicate not only by voice, but we can see who we’re talking to in live video!