VoIP Phone Service
There are two primary components to a high quality VoIP phone system implementation. There is the phone system itself, commonly referred to as a PBX. In addition to a PBX, you need to have phone lines and phone numbers that are connected to that PBX. There are many traditional connection methods to a PBX including plain old telephone service lines (POTS), ISDN, PRI and others. These connection methods are expensive, limited in capacity and are hard to add/remove lines quickly when needed.
Next Wave Communications VoIP Phone Service provides the phone numbers and dial-tone to reach the outside world in the form of SIP Trunks. SIP Trunks are ultimately flexible in that they can provide one or hundreds of lines to a PBX and can be scaled up or down easily. Next Wave Communications provides voip phone service as SIP Trunks to existing PBXs to lower your telephone bill. Our SIP Trunks also provide service to our Hosted 3CX platform. We have partnered with one of the largest providers of phone numbers and voice transmission in the country. We use the same company to carry our voice traffic that Microsoft, Google and many others use.
What is a PBX System?
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, PRI or POTS lines. A PBX also allows you to have more phones than physical phone lines and allows free calls between users. A PBX system provides features like calls transfers, voicemail, call recording, interactive voice menus (IVRs) and call queues.
Have wiring that looks like this?
All of this mess goes away with a clean, new Hosted 3CX Telephone system
Have wiring under your desk like this?
A new Hosted 3CX system uses existing computer network or wifi. This old, unmanageable wiring can all be removed once your new state of the art communications platform is ready. Switching to our Hosted 3CX platform is surprisingly easy with no down time!
Have an old PBX?
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 business 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.
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 business 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 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 a hosted IP PBX brings with it many benefits and opens 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
3CX has established itself as the leading IP-PBX manufacturer, ticking all the check boxes for any business looking for enterprise-grade features and benefits.
Professional and stylish office phones are all the equipment you need. And sometimes you don’t even need that. Messy telco closets are a thing of the past.
How does a PBX phone system work?
In the past, PBX phone systems relied on complex analog switches manned by telephone operators. Modern systems use voice-over-IP (VoIP) systems to send digital signals to and from users. VoIP technology is key to accessing the most advanced features that PBX phone systems have to offer, such as voicemail-to-email, call transfers and call routing.
Once the system converts an incoming call to a digital signal, the system can manage the signal the same way it would any other digital information. This is how digital PBX systems convert and route incoming calls to any device and anywhere. Maintaining an on-premises digital PBX phone system requires a significant investment in addition to high upfront set-up costs. The equipment and on-going support can be expensive, and only highly trained specialists can repair, maintain, or update these systems.
PBX systems are not a one-size-fits-all answer. Businesses can use our Hosted 3CX solution without having to pay a large up-front investment. Next Wave Communications offers IP-PBX infrastructure as a managed service, and pay per user on a monthly fee basis. Get in touch if you would like to speak to a IP-PBX specialist about your companies telephony infrastructure.
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