Almost all businesses use a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) as a local phone system to receive and place calls. A PBX provides business oriented features that your local phone company cannot offer.
An IP-PBX is just a PBX that uses VoIP (Voice over IP) technologies as a way to transport the voice and signaling used to get phone calls from once place to another.
The ability to offer features like letting your business callers reach you on your cell phone even when you’re out of the office is one feature only an IP-PBX typically can offer.
Some of the features older phone systems typically cannot offer are: find me/follow me, personalized call screening and presence detection.
Two of the most common claimed advantages of VoIP is that it’s free and you don’t need additional wiring for your phones. We all know that nothing is free. And you might be able to use your current network wiring for your phones.
The calculations for Bandwidth utilization when utilizing VoIP are beyond the scope of this article. It is usually a good idea to think of needing 80Kb per conversation though this does depend on how your VoIP equipment is set up. To get a good idea, you will need to estimate the maximum number of simultaneous phone conversations expected.
But bandwidth is only part of what needs to be considered. The real issue with using VoIP is that voice traffic should be considered a higher priority transmission than data. And while VoIP devices usually do a good job of setting the appropriate information to let the world know it is voice, many older network devices still do a poor job of honoring this information.
Since VoIP is just digital data, each piece of network equipment adds a little delay to the voice. If you have a large number of devices in between two VoIP connected phones, a delay of several hundred milliseconds or more is possible.
Your VoIP network in the work place is a LAN (Local Area Network) giving you complete control of network devices. And because most businesses have a 10/100 rated LAN and small number of switches, there shouldn’t be too many devices between any two extensions.
Can you use your existing network data connections for your voice traffic? Sometimes. If your business does a lot of heavy movement of data, such as downloads or uploads to or from the Internet or moving or printing large files, then you might want to consider either using a separate LAN or using your legacy telephone wiring as the other LAN for your voice traffic.
Existing telephone wiring may work fine as a separate network if it is Cat 5 or better wiring and you change the connectors from the typical RJ11 to RJ45. Only some testing will tell for sure.
Before discussing the cost of moving to a VoIP phone system, I recommend having your VoIP reseller perform an on site evaluation of your network cabling and equipment. Most VoIP phone system resellers have a good understanding of potential issues and want to make sure you’re happy with your new system.
Looking to find the real information on IP-PBX, then visit us to find information on VoIP Products.