Will operators bill voice separately from data, and if so, how will they distinguish one packet from another?

Billing is a particularly challenging area of voice over Internet protocol (VOIP), says Deon Scheepers, a director at ATIO Corporation. Voice calls are currently billed according to the time they are made, as well as duration and distance. On an IP network, the time a message is sent and the distance it is sent are close to meaningless - the cost to the operator is based on the total bandwidth used, says Scheepers.