What are the advantages of using a PBX phone system?

A couple of other points not mentioned above:

1) A pbx can help your business have a much more professional image than someone calling and having their call answered by a cheap answering machine.
2) A good pbx can connect home-based workers, field personnel, and other offices into one seamless system.
3) You can take advantage of VoIP service, which can save you money.
4) An automated attendant can direct your calls 24 hours a day, so you don't have to dedicate an employee to this.

Robert

There are many advantages of having a PBX, whether it is hosted or on-premise:

1. Call Transferring between employees (even to external numbers)
2. Voicemail for individual users and General Mailboxes for Departments
3. Voicemail to Email feature whereby you can listen to emails on your computer or smartphone
4. Auto Attendant
5. Call Queuing for better customer interaction
6. Take advantage of the cost savings with SIP Trunking (VoIP)
7. Find Me / Follow Me

In summary, most of the features will streamline business processes,
All these features were only available with large enterprise-class phone systems before, starting at about $5 - $7,000. However there has been a shift to focus on the Small-Medium Business (less than 25 employees) with "out-of-the-box" plug and play PBX switches. A few of them are:

1. AastraLink PRO 160
2. Cisco UC500 Series
3. TalkSwitch

Or you can choose from a variety of software-based IP PBX Systems:

1. Trixbox
2. Elastix
3. FreeSwitch
4. PBXnSIP
5. 3CX

Hosted PBX was also mentioned before, your cost per month will be a bit higher however you will not incur the upfront capital costs of purchasing a phone system.

All of these products are very cost effective for a Small Business and will provide most of, if not, all of the functionality you will require.

In its original form, a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) was used to lower the number of lines you were required to get from your local telephone company to provide service to all of your employees. Using reasoning that not everyone is on the phone at the same time, there is efficiency in pooling of resources. SO, rather than have 50 lines for 50 people, as an example, you might order 1 line for each 4 people, or 12 lines rather than 50, saving the cost of 38 lines. These monthly cost savings could then be applied to your PBX hardware.

A Hybrid, when introduced in the 1980, was a mix of capabilities between a PBX, and a Key telephone system, which shared lines similar to a PBX, but generally speaking, each line appeared at each telephone. The term Hybrid, just like PBX has changed in meaning with todays IP based telephone systems.

To answer your question, one truly needs to understand what the PBX is being conpared to. Or are you asking about what are the advantages from the features of todays PBX. Generally, A pbx provides productivity tools to a business's communications needs. Voicemail, rather than note taking, Auto Attendant rather than a dedicated receptionist, Line pooling to reduce monthly recurring expenses, Call Detail Recording for cost allocation of calls to departments, etc.

Just to touch on a few items......................

* Save money and avoid support headaches
* Feature-rich PBX System with Minimum Hassles
* Virtual PBX System Enhances Your Business Image
source : http://www.roniphone.com//voip-pbx.html

Karen

Do you realy need a PBX or will a key system do? how many stations?

Benifits
one time expense
self reliance
secuity
evergreen
feature rich

Drawbacks
Up front cost
equipment liability
upgrades
maintenance

One big thing is what are you trying to do. With that said a PBX is nice cause it allows you to distribute calls in a more efficient fashion. You can have a voicemail for each user, voicemail to email, can ring multiple phones at once, can have a auto attendant (press 1 for sales, press 2 for support, etc.), paging over the phone, intercom, and many more features. There is a PBX called Asterisk that is a free and open source project that does this very well and keeps the costs down.

check out www.ip-pabx.com or email me at ni@supertec.com for pbx solution and great pricing

Hi Karen,

With the increasing amount of communication systems available on the market, it becomes difficult to go for a solution without being able to match the companies/employees/business requirements with all possible communication ways. Therefore, consulting experts analysing your situation more in details is the best approach I would suggest.

Best regards,
Vincent

Solutions Architect

Hello Karen;

A PBX is very feature rich and today can be integrated to almost any IP environment. SIP interoperability is mandatory in choosing the right platform. A PBX or PABX is usually installed in a medium to large business to enhance productivity and mechanize call distribution. It is usually managed by a telecom department or even part of IS/IT.
The key factor is of course scaleability which is a key consideration when proposals are prepared.
This is just a high level overview of course as there are financial factors that would dictate the actual needs of the customer.

Regards,

Harold Statz
Senior System Engineer

Hi Karen,
I just read through these answers and if you're anything like me, you're probably more confused than you were before you asked the question. VoIP is a broad term. If you have a hosted service, then all calls coming in and going out of your office travel over a data network of some kind (i.e. broadband, cable, DSL, T1, SIP, etc.). If you purchased an IP phone system that was installed at your location (i.e. Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Shoretel, etc.) then your internal calls travel between employees over your internal Local Area Network (LAN). Your outbound and inbound calls still travel over the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network - analog trunk, T1, PRI, etc.).

They both have their own problems. Premise-based systems require someone to administer them and require upgrades for new features and applications. However, they're most likely a one time cost or can be structured through a lease and written off as an operating expense. Hosted solutions rely on a true data connection, as mentioned above, to feed features and applications to the router/phones that were provided to you. the monthly cost is constant for as long as you use the service and if that service experiences any issues, you will lose all functionality.

So the question is . . . what have you invested in and what are your expectations? Simple right?

PBX as mentioned by many here can either be IP PBX, TDM or Hybrid. It does not matter which one you take, at the end of the day see if the system you are looking for provides the features you require in your business. A hybrid/TDM solution will have a single point of failure compared to IP solution. With IP you can integrate your existing data network and temporarily reduce infrastructure cost, gradually as your demand increases, you may scale your network bandwidth. IP PBX does have more benefits as it gives you an option to integrate various applications to the PBX system. Applications which can provide realtime stock price, weather updates right at your phone. I am not saying Hybrid PBX's don't do it, but you have to carefully pick the product. At the end of the day you decide what your business requirement is and place it in front of the vendors. Compare the price quote see which one comes close to fulfilling your requirement. Also ensure whether you want to go for a single vendor solution or multi vendor solution, both have pros and cons.
Finally you may opt of XaaS, IPT as a service, UC as a service, whatever way you want to put it. Hosted service is going to be the future. Per line charging is the norm, no headaches. System hosted off-premise and maintained by the vendor. Guarenteed uptime and competetive SLAs, what makes this solution highly viable.

You may answer the following question before getting more appropriate answers.

1. How many users?
2. What features do you need?
3. Do you have multiple branches/locations/remote office?
4.Do you have people wanting to make calls from home using the corporate network?
5. What business are yoiu in?

I assume since you have mentioned that a lot of money will be invested, you are looking for a IP/Hybrid PBXs. By the way Hybrid = TDM+IP.

Abhijit
Consulting Engineer, IP-PBX systems
ciscovoipresource@gmail.com