Abstract: When voice over Internet Protocol (IP) capabilities are added to a conventional network of voice switches, an IP network is normally used to replace individual trunks between voice switches and to replace telephone lines between telephones and their serving voice switches. As a result, calls across the upgraded network often pass across a series of IP hops. Accordingly, the problem of replacing a series of IP hops by a single hop, to avoid degradation of end-to-end voice quality due to repeated packetization/depacketization sequences and associated functions such as compression/decompression, is addressed.