Best Way to Manage Your Phone System: Get Rid of It

By: John Shepler

What is a common denominator for all businesses? Telephones. What’s a common denominator among business phone systems? They need to be managed. Well, what if they didn’t? Would that be a load off your mind and a competitive edge for your business? It certainly could be. Let’s see why. Even more importantly, let’s see how.

The Trouble With Desk Sets
The legacy business phone is a heavy black box full of analog circuitry and connected to the phone company its own telephone “line”. Today, the phones are lighter, some have digital circuitry, others are cordless with multiple handsets. They still have their own unique “telephone” network wiring.

When you have a single phone or a cordless set with several handsets, managing the phone system is no big deal. There’s really nothing to manage. If you’ve got a dial tone, you’re good to make and receive calls. The one thing you might add is a backup battery if the phone has an AC power adaptor. Legacy analog sets get their power right from the phone line. Newer electronic phones, especially the cordless variety, have DC power supplies that plug into the wall.

Management headaches begin when you get a number of phones sharing outside lines. Sure, each phone can have its own outside line, but that gets real expensive real fast. Plus, not everybody is making outside calls at the same time. Some are calling within the company. Many are not on the phone at all.

Types of Business Phone Systems
The two most popular types of business phone systems are Key Telephone Systems (KTS) and Private Branch Exchange (PBX).

Key systems let you call between phones inside the company using only your internal telephone wiring. That’s a big advantage over independent phones because the telephone company will charge you for every call that has to go through their network. The limitation of KTS is that each line has its own button on every phone and has to be manually selected to make or receive calls. That limits the practical number of outside lines to typically 4 or 6.

Private Branch Exchanges are little phone company switches within your business. You can still make internal calls through the PBX without using an outside line. The PBX system manages a pool of outside lines that are shared among all the phones in the system. The number of lines you need depends on what percentage of employees are making or taking calls from outside the company at the same time. A dozen lines can often serve dozens of users.

Why Get Rid of Your Phone System
Someone in the company, and it may be you, is responsible for telephone expenses. These include local and long distance charges, the cost of purchasing and maintaining the phone system, plus moves, adds and changes to your telephone assets.

The cost of “moves, adds and changes” comes from the fact that each phone has a dedicated line that goes to the KTS or PBX. The connection tells the system which phone is picked up or needs to ring. If you want to move a phone to another desk, you have to also move the connection in the phone wiring or reprogram the system so that it knows the new location. Otherwise employees have to change phone numbers every time they are relocated. Add a phone? You’ll need to add a phone jack at that location and a line back to the system.

The larger the company, the more phones there are, the more phone wiring there is to wrangle and the more expensive the phone system becomes. Worse, if your company grows beyond the capacity of your system, you’ll have to upgrade it if possible or rip it out and put in a new one if not. At some point the technology will become obsolete and it will get really pricey or impossible to keep the beast running. Then you are looking at a major capital investment.

How to Get Out of the Phone Business
Whatever business you are in, it is probably not the telephone business. You simply need those phones to get your job done. Even call centers are focused on the services being provided and not the telephone equipment itself.

What if you could just buy or rent the telephone sets as you need them, plug them into your existing computer network and let somebody else worry about buying and maintaining all that expensive switching equipment?

You can with a service called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. Both mean the same thing. VoIP is the technology that turns telephone sets into network peripherals. Like all computers, the phones have their own internal address on the network. They can be plugged into any network jack and will work just fine. No need to change any wiring.

There is no KTS or PBX on your premises. A much larger “Cloud” system is located at the service provider’s data center. All you have on-site are telephone sets called SIP Phones and a special router or call controller to direct phone calls to the provider. You no longer need outside lines to the phone company. Instead, you have a digital SIP Trunk that connects your location to the provider.

The Pay as You Go Advantage
What’s happened is that you have traded a large initial investment in a phone system and the ongoing costs to maintain it and make changes for a simple “cost per seat” for each phone. Some providers include all new SIP phones when you sign up for service. They’ll send more when you expand the business. No need to pay up-front for phones and lines that will sit unused until you need them. If you need to downsize at some point, you return the phones and stop paying for the ones you no longer need.

Advanced Features
Chances are that your existing business phone system doesn’t have the ability to include smartphones or integrate with computers for efficient call center operations. You many not even have the functionality to support auto attendants or hunt groups for multiple agents for your call center. The hosted system will not only have many more advanced features that what you probably have now, but will be kept up to date as new features are offered. You never have to upgrade your phone “system” because the system is provided for you in the cloud.

Are you feeling limited by the functionality, inflexibility or high costs of your current phone system. Before paying a small fortune to upgrade your in-house equipment, take a closer look at Cloud Hosted PBX Business Telephone Service.

End of the Premises Contact Center

By: John Shepler

Business telephone operations have changed a bit over the years. Single line phones soon gave way to the switchboard with live operators to direct calls. Automation replaced the switchboard with the receptionist backed up by a key telephone PBX (Private Branch Exchange) phone system. Call centers with dozens or hundreds of agents performing customer service developed specialized version of PBX systems with integration of computers and telephones. Still, one thing remained constant over the decades of technology evolution. The facilities all remained on-premises.

What’s Wrong With Premises Equipment?
The idea of keeping everything in-house has a appeal to it. After all, if you have the equipment right under your nose, you have complete control of how it works, who gets to use it and what services are available. You might even get lulled into the notion that in-house means much higher reliability than facilities located somewhere out there.

With premises based facilities you do have the ability to take a look at the system whenever you like. You can even give it a love pat from time to time just for good luck.

Along with this ability, you also pick up some responsibilities. You have to provide space, reliable power, connections to each and every phone and on-going maintenance. You didn’t think that these things ran themselves, did you? You also didn’t think that they came free of charge? No, sir. There are some major bucks involved with setting up a call center or contact center phone system and keeping it up to date.

Moving on Up to the Cloud
Unlike the last century or so, today you have the option of being able to run an efficient contact center while unloading the equipment burden. Where does it all go? To the cloud, of course.

Not everything, mind you, but the core system relocates to a remote data center. What you are left with are the actual telephones and computers that you can’t do without. But with a cloud based system, those phones and computers can be scattered around the globe and even at home for some agents, yet all connected as if they were in the same building.

More that Cost Savings
Cloud based contact centers have the obvious advantage of eliminating a major money pit in the form of PBX equipment, software and on-going maintenance. That means less tech support needed at your end. The service provider takes over the support function and handles tech issues 24/7. You may not have been able to even afford this level of scrutiny in-house.

The cloud also has its own benefits. What’s different about a cloud-based system is that a dedicated service prover builds a massive technical plant way beyond what any single company could justify. The benefit to you is that you can likely expand or contract your use of the system at will. If business grows you add more seats and pay for them one by one. If business goes into a tailspin, you eliminate the seats you don’t need.

Another cloud benefit is that you get the latest technology, including features that your in-house system probably can’t provide. That includes individual user features but also major infrastructure like redundant data centers. With duplicated facilities running in parallel, if one center goes down for any reason, the other picks up the load invisibly to you. That translates to higher availability. One vendor, inContact, boasts 99.99% availability.

Tools for Higher Productivity
The inContact suite of tools includes ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) with skills-based routing, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) with speech recognition, CTI (Computer Telephone Integration), predictive , progressive and preview dialers, call recording, extensive reporting, quality monitoring and Workforce Optimization tools.

Sure, you might develop an ad-hoc solution in-house that could provide similar functions, but you’re looking at a substantial development process that sucks up time and money and then YOU have to keep it all running and make improvements over the years. Why re-invent the wheel when the latest in call center efficiency is available for your use right now and can grow with your needs?

Do you have a stand alone call center or a contact center as part of your core business that includes 15 or more “agents” on the phones? If so, cloud based communications
may be exactly what you need right now.


Note: Original photo of telephone operators courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives on Wikimedia Commons.

Non-PBX Telephone Solutions

By: John Shepler

We all know what business telephone systems look like. The very smallest consist of a single desk set or a cordless system with multiple handsets but still one line. Next up are key telephone systems where each phone has buttons to access 2 to 6 outside lines. Beyond that is the realm of the Private Branch Exchange or PBX. This is the standard for most business office applications… or at least it was.

Why PBX?
What made PBX systems popular was the opportunity to get away from having to pay the telephone company for internal calls and lines that mostly sat idle. Yes, there was a time when every phone had its own line to the telco and its own incoming phone number. If you wanted to call someone down the hall, you had to place a local phone call just like if you called someone across town. Each of those calls rang the register at the local phone company.

Direct Connections
It seems obvious today that calls from desk to desk inside your own building should be direct connections. There’s no need to use an outside line to go down to the telco switch and another line to come right back. A simple connection between the two local phones works just fine. What’s needed is a switch like the one at the telephone company office, but for inside the business only. That’s what a PBX is. It’s a miniature telephone exchange switch. That’s the “private” in Private Branch Exchange.

Why PBX Seemed Ideal
All internal calls are managed by the PBX on its own wiring. There are no per-call charges. The PBX also manages outside lines that are used for calls that come in to or leave the premises. There are almost always fewer outside lines than phones because many calls are internal and most phone sit idle while other work is being done. This optimizes the cost of telephone service for the business, right?

Escalating Costs
That was true when PBX was the only game in town. The one fly in the ointment is the cost of the PBX system including maintenance and repairs, and the everyday effort needed for moves, adds and changes. That PBX is just a machine. It doesn’t know that you moved your phone to another location until you tell it to use a different set of wires.

Flexibility Issues
PBX systems aren’t all that flexible, either. Each machine has a capacity. Sure, you can upgrade to add more phones… up to a point. Then you have to install a much larger system when your business grows beyond what your current equipment will support. That’s a major capital investment.

What’s a Better AlternativeToday?
Like many innovations in information technology, moving your phone system to the cloud offers a number of advantages. Yes, there is still something that provides the same function as your old PBX. But, it is a largely software driven system that is located remotely, has nearly unlimited expansion capacity and, best of all, you don’t have to pay for it. You only pay to use the system.. and that’s pay as you go.

How Cloud Communications Works
Cloud communications, also called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP, is a virtual PBX system offered as a service. What you have in-house are telephones that plug into your local area network instead of standard telephone jacks. The connection from the network to the service provider is called a SIP trunk. It serves the same function as the analog or digital lines to the phone company that you have now.

What You Gain With a Hosted Solution
The beauty of a hosted PBX solution is that you can move phones around at will without any wiring changes. Just plug the phone into another network jack and the system will recognize it and know who it is assigned to. Adding or removing phones from the system is done through a simple browser interface. Some cloud suppliers will even provide you with business phone sets as you need them. It’s included in the “per seat” cost of your service.

Day to Day Operations
How does this work on a day to day basis? Your phones still act like normal telephones. You can make internal calls with no per-minute charges, often even if the other phone is at a branch office on the other side of the country. Only calls that have to go over the public telephone system will still have per-minute charges, like you pay today.

Advanced Calling Features
Hosted PBX systems are always up to date and have advanced calling features you may not enjoy today, such as the ability to include mobile phones within the system. They have a dedicated staff to keep the switching equipment working 24/7. In the rare event that tornado or flood destroys your office, your phone system will still work. You just need some working phones and a network connection to the cloud to be back in business.

Check Out The Value of Non-PBX Solutions
Are you looking at a new business phone system or facing a costly upgrade cycle? Before you go the PBX route, take a look at what a hosted PBX solution offers in the way of performance and cost control for your organization.

Packet Voice Moves to the Cloud

Many businesses and individuals have already switched to VoIP for their telephone service. The original impetus is a cost savings over legacy phone service. Beyond that, enterprise VoIP services offer the opportunity for reduced staff and maintenance coupled with a richer feature set. Just when you thought that VoIP was a settled technology, a new wrinkle comes along. That’s VoIP up in the cloud.

Why move your phone service to a cloud? Let’s take a look at why this might be advantageous to your company and how we got from the old-timey candlestick and desk sets to something as amorphous as a cloud.

A generic technical term for VoIP technology is packet voice. Packets are a computer network protocol most often associated with Ethernet. A packet is a self-contained piece of data that has all the information needed to get it from source to destination. Packets are packets. It doesn’t matter what’s inside. Packets can carry voice, images, video, data and whatever else you can reduce to binary digits.

The major technical leap in packet voice is changing from a switched circuit telephone network to a packet switched network. Switched circuit means that every telephone call has an electrical circuit set up to connect the two (or more) phone sets involved in the conversation. This is unique to the public telephone system and has been that way since its inception. All telephone activity was originally voice calls made between electrically passive telephone sets. Look at one of those old phones. Do you see an AC cord? No way. The electrical power for the call was supplied by batteries at the telephone switching center.

When computer networks became more prevalent than telephone networks, the idea of what a network is changed dramatically. Both telephone and computer networks can run over twisted pair copper wire equally well. What’s different is that computer networks don’t set up and tear down electrical circuits every time that one piece of equipment wants to exchange data with another. The circuits that connect each computer device are continuous. What is switched is the data packets themselves. Ethernet switches or routers ensure that packets get to their intended destinations without having to create new circuit connections on the fly just for a single or group of packets.

Here’s why that’s important. VoIP or packet voice is transported over computer networks rather than switched circuit telephone networks that are only used for telephones. By connecting the phone to the LAN, you can eliminate the separate telephone network. All that wiring and the personnel needed to maintain it and change connections as phones are moved, added or deleted goes away. The cost of running the telephone network also goes away.

Something much larger doesn’t go away. That’s the switching system needed to interconnect telephones, even those using packets, and connect to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for outside lines. That specialized switching system is most often called a Public Branch Exchange or PBX. Small businesses with few phones and outside lines may use a simpler system called KTS or Key Telephone System. Those are the phones with individual line lights that tell you if a particular phone line is being used or available for your call. Medium and larger companies have the more automated PBX equipment that manages both internal calls and multiple outside lines.

This is where the cloud comes in. An in-house PBX system can be set up to work with legacy analog phones (switched circuit) or the newer IP telephones used for VoIP. You can connect the phones and PBX to your computer network to eliminate the separate telephone wiring, but you still have to make connections to the public phone network if you want to take or make outside calls. PBX systems aren’t cheap, either. They require a major investment, ongoing maintenance efforts and the likelihood that you’ll have to replace the one you have when it goes obsolete or runs out of capacity.

Why not move that PBX to the cloud the same way that you move servers from in-house to the cloud? That’s the idea behind Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP. The hosting is done by a very large packet voice switching system located at a cloud service provider. You don’t have to buy this system, maintain it or worry about upgrades and obsolescence. That’s the job of the cloud service provider. You simply pay a monthly fee for each phone or “seat” that you need.

Ironically, this concept takes us back to the early days of telephony when there was a large central switching system that connected to each telephone. The difference between the old “Ma Bell” approach and Hosted VoIP is that you are no longer tied to the single phone company that owns the phone wires. You can order network connections called SIP trunks to connect to any cloud provider you want. VoIP technology also allows new applications that integrate telephones and computers, important for call centers and contact centers.

Packet network technology has enabled computers to network within companies and all over the world. This technology is now being used to transmit video conferences and telephone calls on the Internet and private network connections. The rise of cloud computing companies takes packet switching equipment to the next level by moving the central hardware to the cloud, where it can be managed by specialized service providers. The advantage to you is lower costs and more features.

Are you wondering whether your business telephone system is optimum for your current requirements? Why not explore other options that include VoIP, SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX services? Get pricing and features for competing enterprise grade VoIP services to compare with your current setup.

Rise Of The Cloud Hosted PBX

The days of the in-house PBX or Private Branch Exchange may be numbered. AireSpring, one of the fastest growing and most innovative of the competitive carriers, is now offering a cloud hosted PBX system they call AirePBX. With AirePBX, the PBX disappears but the phones remain.

In a way, we're going back in time to move forward. In the beginning, all switching was done at the telephone company central office and all phones were connected to the telco switch. Then came in-house telephone operator switchboards and later automated switchboards called Key Telephone Systems (KTS) and Private Branch Exchanges (PBX). What a cloud hosted PBX does is move the switching system back to the service provider.

So, how can you save money by going back to an earlier network architecture? A lot has changed in the last century. For one thing, the monolithic “Ma Bell” no longer exists. There are a lot of competitive carriers vying for your business. That alone offers better pricing options. Technology has also changed. Phones no longer need their own network. With VoIP, the telephone shares the same network as all the company computers, printers and other devices. The fact that you don’t need special proprietary wiring to connect to your phone service provider further increases competitive offerings and available features.

The idea behind a hosted VoIP system or cloud hosted PBX is that the expensive PBX system and its need for constant attention is taken over by a supplier who is in the PBX telephone business. That’s not the business you are in, is it? In fact, having to buy, install and maintain this equipment doesn’t really give you a competitive advantage at all. It’s just one more thing you pay for to get the communications services you need.

This is why companies are more than happy to ditch their venerable PBX in favor of a cloud solution. They are especially open to this alternative if their PBX is temperamental, nearing capacity, too old to be maintained, or too limited in features. Sure, you can go out and buy a shiny new model and do a “forklift upgrade.” Stop and think, though. Do you really want to shell out the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of dollars needed for a new PBX, or would you rather pay as you go?

Let’s take a look at what AirePBX has to offer. You don’t have a PBX system in-house anymore. You just have IP phones plugged into your network and AireSpring provides those. No capital investment required. Each phone has its own voicemail. You can even get visual voicemail. Even though the PBX is hosted remotely, your internal call routing is still free, as are local outside calls. An auto-attendant is included to direct incoming calls. You can set up hunting for workgroups, add toll free numbers and virtual private numbers, have conference calls, and enjoy all the features you’d expect in a modern business phone system.

All of this is fully managed by AireSpring on their next generation IP backbone network to ensure voice quality and system availability. Compared to the often dicey performance of Internet VoIP implementations, this is head and shoulders better. AirePBX is an enterprise VoIP solution that scales easily for small and medium companies, too.

Are you in search of a better business telephone system for your company? If so, you may be surprised and delighted by the capabilities and low costs of the new cloud hosted PBX solutions. Why not get a quote for hosted VoIP phone services and see if you can have the business communications you need without the cost and aggravation of maintaining your own in-house telephone system.

Where Hosted PBX Solutions Save

Business telephone systems range from the very simple with a few phones and a few lines to complex private branch exchanges that support multiple sites. The new approach is a hosted PBX that makes things simple again. But do hosted PBX solutions really save anything and can they maintain voice quality?

With the simplest arrangement of a single landline phone connected to the local phone company, there really isn’t much to manage. You pay so much per month for “dial tone” that makes your phone work and gives you typically unlimited local calling. You have the option to switch to a different provider for long distance service or use a dial-around service for international calling. These are options to save you on the per minute calling rates.

The basic analog or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone service seems simple because all the complexity is at the other end of the wire. What you don’t see or have to deal with is the intricacies of connecting your line to any of billions worldwide or to even more billions of wireless callers. If you have, say, 3 business locations with 1 phone each, they talk to each other by dialing up the desired location just like any other phone number.

Businesses found out just how complex the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) was when they got big enough to have lots of desk phones and a dozen or more outside lines. What many companies did was to buy their own telephone switching system called a PBX (Private Branch Exchange.) The advantage of having your own PBX system is that calls within the company stay on your own wiring and you don’t have to pay the telephone company to connect them. That includes more complex PBX arrangements with digital tie lines that connect multiple locations in a private network. Once again, the motivation is to keep as many calls as possible off the public network to avoid “toll” charges.

Many companies have rued the day the got into the telephone business. PBX systems are expensive to buy and need constant updates as employees move within the company. There is also maintenance activity for both the PBX and its telephone network wiring.

Hosted PBX is a fairly new service that offers to offload the expense of in-house phone systems. It only became possible when most companies installed Local Area Networks for their computers and the price of private digital lines became affordable. The enabling technology is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. In this case, Internet refers to the technology standard and not necessarily use of the public Internet.

Hosted PBX refers to using a large PBX telephone system that is located or hosted by a third-party service provider. This PBX is big enough to handle the telephone traffic of many different companies to gain an economy of scale. In a way, this is similar to going back to the days where each phone was individually connected to a local telephone company that took care of call switching.

So, where does the cost savings come from? Network consolidation is one area. Both telephones and computers run on a single converged voice and data network. There are no separate telephone wires. This network is extended to the hosted PBX provider using a private digital line called a SIP trunk. You are not tied to a particular service provider. There are many competing hosted PBX solutions and that competition is another way that cost savings can be offered.

The private SIP trunk helps to maintain high voice quality because it provides the characteristics of low latency, jitter, packet loss and congestion, along with quality of service mechanisms that keep data packets from interfering with voice packets. You can also buy Internet based hosted PBX services at lower costs, but the vagaries of the public Internet can introduce distortion and clipping in the conversations.

Do hosted PBX solutions offer a real cost savings for your company? It depends on how many seats you have, what features you want and what your existing system is costing you. If you are close to replacing an aging PBX or one that has run out of capacity, the economics highly favor hosted solutions. To decide for yourself, get competitive pricing on hosted PBX solutions for business. It may come down to whether you want to pay as you go versus investing in your own in-house phone system.

PBX Telephone Connection Services

PBX or Private Branch Exchange telephone systems are ubiquitous in medium and larger businesses, call centers, customer contact centers and any business with lots of telephones. The PBX really has two jobs. One is to manage all the phones in the organization for internal calls. The other is to manage all the outside phone lines so that they are shared efficiently among all users. What you want is the right number and type of lines to conduct business efficiently at the least cost.

There are multiple types of lines and also several technologies to consider. You can choose from local or long distance service, incoming or outgoing or bidirectional, and toll free line services. But you can also choose the connection technology. These include analog, switched circuit digital, and IP-based digital.

Analog telephone service has been the mainstay of telephony for over a century. It’s so mature and familiar that it’s known in the industry as POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service. POTS connects by a single copper twisted pair directly from your location to the telco central office. It uses a combination of DC and AC voltages to give you dial tone, rotary and touch-tone dialing, full duplex conversations, and on-off hook signaling. POTS also supports Caller ID.

One POTS line supports one telephone conversation, but it can support more than one telephone set. A very common arrangement is 2 to 4 POTS lines connected to a 2 or 4 line business phone. Multiple phones can make use of these lines, but you need to look for a line-in-use light to know if a phone line is free for your use. When you expand to 4 to 8 lines, you’ll probably install a key telephone system that allows the various phone sets to communicate internally without using an outside line. This system still uses indicator lights to show which lines are in use. You have to manually select an available line to make a call.

PBX systems are computer-based telephone controllers that take over the job of managing outside phone lines. You can connect as many POTS lines as you need to the PBX. When someone requests an outside line by dialing “9”, the system will use the next available line. Users don’t have to worry about selecting lines themselves.

PBX systems also offer a way to reduce your telephone service costs by using digital trunking services instead of POTS. You need 6 to 12 outside lines at a minimum for this to be cost effective. Instead of installing a dozen POTS lines to your PBX system, you plug in a single T1 telephone line that supports up to two dozen phone lines on a single “trunk” line.

The most popular switched-circuit telephone trunk that replaces multiple POTS lines is called ISDN PRI. ISDN is a digital telephony standard, PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. This service is delivered over a T1 line, so it is also called T1 PRI. What you get is up to 23 outside lines that you can specify to be incoming, outgoing, local, long distance, etc. There is also a signaling and data channel that provides rapid connections and Caller ID services for each line.

A recently developed service called SIP Trunking is based on IP networks used for converged voice and data services. A SIP Trunk can carry both broadband Internet and VoIP telephone services between your location and your service provider. SIP trunks may have a cost advantage, especially if you can use a single T1 line for both voice and data.

Interestingly, both traditional PBX systems and the newer IP PBX systems can connect to POTS, ISDN PRI or SIP Trunks. You need the appropriate interface card, of course, but many systems offer multiple interfaces built-in. If you need more lines, you add one or more additional interface cards.

With all these options, what is the most cost effective solution for your business telephone needs? The best solution will be based on your specific usage patterns and the latest offers from multiple competitive carriers. That’s too much information to digest by simply shopping around. A better way is to use a combination of an automated search process and expert consultants. Both are available for your use at no cost at T1 Rex. Use the online GeoQuote (tm) or call the toll free number for immediate service, and see how much you can save compared to what your phone services currently cost.

Private Branch Exchange Connections

Private Branch Exchanges, also known as PBX telephone systems, are the most popular business phone technology for medium and large organizations. Recent technical advancements have brought PBX prices down to the point where even small companies can upgrade from hard wired analog phones or key telephone systems. If you are in the market for a new PBX system or want to see what's available, you can contact the VAR Network to get an idea on prices and system options.

In addition to the hardware, Private Branch Exchange systems need connectivity. There are a wide variety of options available, each with their own cost and performance advantages. The most basic connection is called an FXO or Foreign Exchange Office. That's another way to say analog telephone line to a phone company central office or CO. These are individual twisted pair connections that provide dial tone and local phone service. They may also be set up for long distance calling and toll free numbers. For one to a few lines, it's hard to beat good old analog lines for cost and voice quality.

Once your business has grown to the size where you are using more than a half-dozen outside lines, it's time to consider trunking services. A trunk is digital phone line that carries multiple conversations simultaneously. The most popular digital trunk line is ISDN PRI, which stands for Integrated Services Digital Network Primary Rate interface. That mouthful is jargon for a T1 line that offers up to 23 outside lines plus faster call switching and Caller ID. Another version of T1 telephone service offers 24 phone lines, but slower call switching and no Caller ID information. ISDN PRI lines usually plug into an interface card on your PBX system, a common option.

The reasons to go with ISDN PRI service are high voice quality at lower cost than multiple analog lines. This type of service is very popular with corporate users and call centers. Each line can be configured for incoming and/or outgoing calls. DID service can give each employee their own telephone number without having a separate outside line for every number. The system assigns lines as needed. Larger organizations can get multiple ISDN PRI lines for greater capacity.

The newest PBX systems go by the designation IP PBX. This is enterprise VoIP telephony. IP PBX systems can have individual lines run to each phone or use SIP handsets connected to an Ethernet network. SIP is the switching technology of VoIP. A SIP trunk can provide outside phone lines and even Internet service as an option to the combination of ISDN PRI trunking plus T1 dedicated Internet access.

With all these options, how do you go about choosing the right service for the performance and capacity you need? An easy way is to get free comparison pricing and discussion of your needs with a expert consultant from Telarus through the Shop For T1 service. Even if you already have a phone system that you are happy with, Telarus can likely save you money on your monthly business phone bills.