Telephone call

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A telephone call, phone call, voice call, or simply a call, is the effective use of a connection over a telephone network between the calling party and the called party.

Telephone calls are the form of human communication that was first enabled by the development of the telephone and several inventions in the mid- to late-19th century. Initial technology involved point-to-point electrical wire connections between telephone installations, until centralized exchanges evolved where telephone operators established each interconnection manually at a telephone switchboard after asking the calling party for their call destination. After the invention of automatic telephone exchanges in the 1890s, the process became increasingly automated, eventually leading to the widespread adoption of digital exchanges in the second half of the 20th century, including the transition to wireless communication via mobile telephone networks and cellular networks.^[1] With the development of the Internet, the cost of telephone calls was drastically reduced with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).