Voice over IP technology has revolutionized the technology behind phone calls and allowed them to come down drastically in price as it has opened up telephony over the internet between distant places.  In many cases, you will need a VOIP telephone adaptor in order to take full advantage of VOIP technology while still using your old original phone.  You can buy these adaptors by searching online or from an office supplies center.

A VOIP telephone adaptor is necessary for using your current phone with new voip technology because the two use different methods of communication.  Your old phone speaks analog, and sends and receives voices as modulated electric current on a phone line.  A VOIP phone may look similar, but it actual records and digitizes your voice, encodes it in small groups of information called "packets" and sends it across the information.  It works easily because it makes a voice call work just like the other internet packets which might be web pages or MP3 songs on the internet.  Then, the phone on the other side receives these packets and uses the information inside to reproduce the sound of your voice.  You can't hoop up your old phone to the Internet since it does not speak the Voice over Internet Protocol.  You will need a translator device which is the telephone adaptor that sits in the middle and converts the analog signals into digital packets, and the digital packets back into analog signals because your older phone can not do this alone.

Your other choice is to get rid of your current phone and replace it with a pure VOIP handset which can automatically talk via the Internet without an adaptor.  This can be a bit expensive, but then you won't need to use an adaptor and the phones can have all sorts of new technology that was not possible before.  Eventually this may include even making video calls which will never be possible on your old phone. A VOIP telephone adaptor is an ideal way to ease into this new frontier of technology to see how it works and not make a big up front investment in buying a new phone.  In the future, all of your new phones should be VOIP-compatible so that you will not need to also buy adaptors in able to allow them to work with next generation telephony technology.  You can find these adaptors for sale affordably at many stores in the internet.