Call origination

Call origination, also known as voice origination, refers to the collecting of the calls initiated by a calling party on a telephone exchange of the

PSTN The public switched telephone network (PSTN) provides infrastructure and services for public telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other el ...

, and handing off the calls to a

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Interne ...

endpoint or to another exchange or

telephone company A telephone company, also known as a telco, telephone service provider, or telecommunications operator, is a kind of communications service provider (CSP), more precisely a telecommunications service provider (TSP), that provides telecommunicat ...

for completion to a called party. In the VoIP world, the opposite of call origination is call termination, where a call initiated as a VoIP call is terminated to the

. The term is often used in referring to a VoIP trunking service that provides the ability for calls to originate on the PSTN and be delivered to a customer's VoIP endpoint. It is often referred to as "DID" (for Direct Inward Dialing) which more properly refers to a service entirely within the PSTN where individual PSTN numbers can terminate on a customer's PBX. {{telecommunications-stub Voice over IP Teletraffic