Make the Switch

Is it time to upgrade a PBX system?

PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange, which is a private telephone network used within a company or organization. The users of the PBX phone system can communicate internally (within their company) and externally (with the outside world), using different communication channels. Tech Check can provide conversions from old PBX systems for schools, government facilities and small businesses of any size.

Traditional PBXs would have their own proprietary phones, such that there would be a way to re-use these phones with a different system. This means that we either have system-lock-in (we are bound to the same system because changing system means also changing phones, which makes it prohibitively expensive to break away) or vendor-lock-in (we are bound to the same vendor because the phones are only usable with systems from the same vendor, sometimes only within a particular range of systems). With a traditional PBX, you are typically constrained to a certain maximum number of outside telephone lines (trunks) and to a certain maximum number of internal telephone devices or extensions.

Time and technology, however, have changed the consumer telephony landscape, with the flag-bearer being the Open-Standards-based IP PBX. The point of the “IP” in this new era is that the phone calls are delivered using the Internet Protocol as the underlying transport technology. Conversions from old PBX systems to an IP PBX brings many benefits and opens up possibilities, allowing for almost unlimited growth in terms of extensions and trunks, and introducing more complex functions that are more costly and difficult to implement with a traditional PBX, such as:

  • Ring Groups
  • Queues
  • Digital Receptionists
  • Voicemail
  • Reporting