Is HPBX Your Next PBX?

It’s almost back to the future, to coin a phrase. Companies nationwide are getting rid of their phone switching equipment and going back to service providers, what we used to call telephone companies. Only the phones and the telephone trunk lines remain. Is technology reversing itself or is there something new going on here?

Make no mistake about it, telephony today is different from the telephone service of yesteryear. But there are similarities, too. What companies have found is that building and maintaining little telephone companies in-house entails a lot more cost and bother than you might expect. If that’s true, though, why did they ever leave good old Ma Bell in the first place?

One problem with business phone service versus what you have in your home is that there are lots and lots of phones. If you only have one or two lines, you probably have just one or two phones. It’s likely that each phone is tied to a particular phone line. Perhaps you have multi-line phones where each line has a switch or “key” so you can select it. Some small offices have only a single phone set one one line and use a second line to connect a FAX machine or credit card terminal.

So what’s the problem with having so many phones? It’s pretty likely that by the time you have a few dozen phones, your office facilities are so spread out that people can’t lean over to the next desk and have a conversation. They either have to get up and walk down the hall or make a phone call. If each phone has its own line, then those calls will go through the phone company and you’ll likely pay a charge. If you want to talk to someone in a branch office in another state, you’re surely going to pay long distance charges.

What companies really wanted was something of an intercom feature, where they could just dial a few digits and get to another phone in-house. To accomplish that, they bought PBX or Private Branch eXchange equipment. The PBX is the device that connects phones and also managed outside lines as needed. All the phones connect to the PBX and the PBX connects to the phone company, but only for calls leaving the premises.

The local telephone companies offer a service called Centrex (Central Office Exchange) to compete with the PBX. The switching equipment is kept at the central office, like always, but the system functioned more like a PBX. The Centrex system based on the individual copper pair from each phone to the CO is now being replaced by HPBX or Hosted PBX service.

What’s different about HPBX is that it is a VoIP phone system. Communication is over a WAN network connection called a SIP Trunk. This frees the user from being tied to a particular local phone company by those ubiquitous twisted copper pair. Now any service provider anywhere in the world can be your phone company as long as you can get a digital connection between their facilities and yours. What you need in-house is IP phones, also called SIP telephones, connected to your converged voice and data network. Your service provider hosts the PBX switching function with termination to the public switched telephone network as needed.

Are you ready for a phone system upgrade or merely concerned that what you are doing now costs more than it could? Get competitive quotes for hosted PBX telephone systems, some of which include new phones as part of the service fee.

High Fiber Diet for Business Not Expensive

As business conditions improve and activity increases, many businesses are starting to feel a pinch. It’s coming from a constriction around the middle of the operation. The problem is way too much data trying to flow through too small of a WAN network connection. The solution? How about a high fiber diet?

In this case, the fiber is fiber optic communications. One thin strand of glass fiber can handle voice, data and video packets faster than nearly any business can generate them. The light that illuminates the fiber can even be channelized into separate wavelengths or colors, each of which can support Gigabits per second rates. Once you have a fiber optic connection to your building, you have access to nearly unlimited bandwidth.

But isn’t fiber optic communications prohibitively expensive? It used to be, but not anymore. The reason is competition. Where the incumbent local telephone company was once the only game in town, there are now dozens of competitive service providers. Many of these have not only their own fiber optic core networks, but fiber optic and copper access networks as well.

Copper? Yes, multiple pair of ordinary twisted pair copper wiring can transport Ethernet services up to 45 Mbps to connect with nearby carrier points of presence. Fiber optic access can be installed to most metropolitan business locations where the volume of usage justifies the costs of construction. It’s not uncommon now for operators of buildings with many business offices or industrial parks to install fiber optic service as a “utility” during construction. Once the fiber facilities are in place, service levels can be adjusted to meet the demand of the business tenants.

What services are available over fiber optic carriers? The most basic service level is DS3. This is the same digital service that runs on T3 lines at 45 Mbps. DS3 doesn’t even start to consume the total capacity of even one fiber strand, so it is possible to have multiple DS3 connections serving multiple customers all multiplexed on the same fiber optic carrier.

SONET, the Synchronous Optical NETwork, is the traditional fiber optic service. Typical SONET services are OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps. There are other levels specified, but they are not as commonly available.

Many newer competitive service providers have based their networks on IP technology rather than SONET, a telco standard. They’ve chosen to offer Ethernet as a WAN service. There are many service levels to choose from, but popular options include 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, and 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet or GigE. It’s not unreasonable or prohibitively expensive to order 10 Gbps Ethernet if your business has the need for such high bandwidths. That’s especially true when time to market or collaborative productivity are a high priority.

How about the cost of fiber optic services? They’re now much lower that you would expect. It’s not uncommon to get 100 Mbps Ethernet bandwidth for a fraction of what you would have paid a few years ago. If your need has just materialized or you’ve been using high capacity data services and haven’t run competitive pricing searches recently, you should certainly get current quotes before you decide that more bandwidth is beyond your budget level. You could be very surprised by the results.

Find out how what variety of fiber optic services are available for your business location and how much they cost. Our GigaPackets online resource will get you an answer quickly and easily.