The inventors of the "end to end" property of the Internet knew that a network with less, rather than more, funcionality in the middle (center) would be more flexible, and more suitable for applications that required weak error-checking. The Internet is a "end to end network".
The inventors of the "end to end" property of the Internet knew that a network with less, rather than more, funcionality in the middle (center) would be more flexible, and more suitable for applications that required weak error-checking.

They did not envision Internet telephony, nevertheless made a network perfect for voice transmission where a few data errors cannot impede our ability to hear and understand and where the delays involved in retransmission of bad data can make fluent conversation impossible.

In other words, without the end-to-end property of the Internet, without the ability to use different error-checking protocols like UDP (user datagram protocol, intended for transmission of small, unsequenced data units) and RTP (real-time protocol, designed specifically to relax error-checking) in place of TCP, applications like Internet telephony and online gaming would be awkward to implement and prohibitively expensive. But because Internet error-checking occurs in the endpoints, programmers are free to substitute protocols that are looser or tighter as their application demands. The Internet, the world''s overarching end-to-end network, is now the connectivity medium of communications.

Yet telephone company networks are still centralized networks designed for a single application, voice.
Phone companies still make more money from voice than from other network traffic, even though the volume of data traffic now exceeds voice.

Furthermore, Internet voice is getting better and better