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What is PBX?
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 like Voice over IP, ISDN or analog. A PBX also allows you to have more phones than physical phone lines (PTSN) and allows free calls between users. Additionally, it provides features like transfer calls, voicemail, call recording, interactive voice menus (IVRs) and call queues.
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).
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.
PBX phone systems are available as hosted or virtual solutions and as on-premise solutions to be run on your own hardware.
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. Users of the PBX phone system (phones or extensions) share the outside lines for making external phone calls.
Switching to an IP PBX brings with it 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
What is VOIP?
Voice over IP, or VoIP, is short for Voice over Internet Protocol and refers to the transmission of voice traffic over an internet connection. Traditional telephony, known as the Public Switched Telephone Network or PSTN for short, works through physical phone lines, cable systems and networks and allows users to make landline and cellular telephone calls. IP telephony however is much more versatile and enables voice, data and video to be transmitted to a variety of devices including smartphones, laptops, tablets and IP phones at a much lower cost.
There are a variety of applications and software communications systems that utilize Voice over IP to offer full featured business communications solutions as well as internet telephony for personal use. Most modern device manufacturers, like Apple, have integrated native IP apps into there smartphones, such as Apple Face Time which provides call and video functionality.
Voice over IP converts data, such as voice or video, into a digital signal and transfers it over the internet as digital data packets. In order to use VoIP technology, you need a VoIP service or application to facilitate the calls, internet access, and a SIP trunk or VoIP provider. Some broadband or telephony providers offer IP telephony as standard or alongside traditional PSTN services. However, most telco providers are gradually making the switch to all IP. In the case that your regular phone service provider offers VoIP solutions, you won’t need to employ a separate SIP trunk or VoIP provider.
Using packet-switched technology to transmit voice, VoIP uses a series of protocols to facilitate calls. These include the RTP (Real Time Transport) protocol which defines a standard packet format in order to deliver media over the internet. Additionally, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is a signalling protocol used to establish, maintain and terminate a session between 2 or more participants. Voice and video data is broken down into packets which are sent over the internet and then reconstructed to be delivered in real-time as the original voice or video message.
VoIP can facilitate tasks and deliver features and functionality that might be cumbersome or costly to implement when using traditional PSTN.