The invention is concerned with improvements in full duplex Internet
telephone systems with a system architecture having low latency and
permitting voice communication with telephone to telephone or PC to
telephone connections. The architecture permits dynamic packet-to-packet
change in codec to adjust for Internet conditions. The voice port creates
self-describing packet conditions so that the higher-level software of
the system is independent of codec selection. In addition to adjusting
the codec, the voice port has the capability of dynamically and
concurrently selecting other factors such as the level of error
correction redundancy, the packet size and packet bundling on a
packet-to-packet basis. The invention further includes a technique to
eliminate dead air spaces in the voice data transmission stream by
speeding up or slowing down the data rate in the buffer while maintaining
a constant pitch of speech.