The Voice Funnel was an experimental high-speed interface between digitized speech streams and a packet-switching communications network, in particular the ARPANET

ARPANET

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...

. It was built in the time frame from 1979 to 1981. It may be viewed as an early Voice over IP

Voice over IP

Voice over Internet Protocol is a family of technologies, methodologies, communication protocols, and transmission techniques for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol networks, such as the Internet...

 voice and video telephone.

The Voice Funnel was designed and built by Bolt, Beranek and Newman. During the 1980s, it was used for audio and video conferences across the ARPANET

ARPANET

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...

, and later evolved into the multi-processor BBN Butterfly computer.