Business Phone Systems
If you wanted to have a business phone system, one with multiple lines, the ability to transfer calls between them, allow users to call one another inside the company using extensions, and have basic conference call functionality, you used to have to spend quite a bit of money on a PBX system.
This is no longer the case, since there are many alternatives now available. So if you currently have an existing PBX system that needs an upgrade, now might be the time to retire it. And if you are struggling without a business telephone system, the good news is there are inexpensive ways to upgrade.
Existing PBX systems often leave a lot to be desired, for instance, they are very hard to expand, often costing a significant amount of money to add a line, if you have already maxed out the number of lines the system has. They are also costly to upgrade, simply because you need specialized personnel to do the work. You need someone who has an understanding of the PBX system, in order to configure it to work for your business.
Going virtual in this case however, does not mean eliminating all of the costs. The phones that everyone has at their desk will cost you money, if you want a conference phone in the conference room (a speaker phone that offers multiple mics and noise canceling functionality) will cost you, and of course there is the connection to a phone company. Almost all new phone systems will use VOIP as the last connection to the phone company, so you will need your phone system to be able to communicate with the phone system, and this is going to have a cost associated with it.
If you hunt around the internet you can find free alternatives to all of these expenses. For instance, you can use a virtual phone (one that runs on your computer), to replace the costly phone that would reside on your desk. But that means, your computer has to be on, not rebooting at the time the call comes in, and that you can see your screen, etc. They are not ideal, and if your business can afford it, you should not choose these shortcuts. For almost every business, having a way to communicate with the employees and customers is critical.
Replacing the phone system
There are two ways to replace or purchase a new virtual PBX system. You can purchase it as a service from a company that will offer it as a cloud service, or you can host it yourself.
Normally I would only talk about the self hosted method, but I thought it would be good to have something to contrast it with. Companies like Ring Central offer a very simple to get in to service, that is not that expensive, and offers most of the features that the self hosted method would, with the exception of being able to choose your phone provider. Also, Asterisk is now offering a hosted version of their open source product.
To host it yourself, an Asterisk is an excellent choice. Not only do they offer it as a hosted solution, but they allow you to get the same code they use in their hosted environment, to use with your own system. Although it is possible to set this up with a single phone line, and connect it to Skype, its not a practical use of it. This system is designed to create a virtual office phone system, virutal PBX, and is quite complex and costly to set up. But in the end, you will have a configurable, easy to expand system, that allows you to control the costs by connecting it to various phone companies, and not being locked in to using only one provider.
For instance, this system could be created to route all local & long distance calls through one phone company, and all international calls through another. You can even configure your phone, so that it can recognize users on Skype, and direct calls to them, using Skype at no cost using Skype for Asterisk. That kind of flexibility can really save money for some organizations.
Since this is such a big system, I can not cover it all now. In another post, I’ll talk about how to setup a server to host your own phone system using Asterisk on Linux.
Entries (RSS)