On to the on-site IP PBX options. If you like rolling your own, the most open, customizable, and versatile option is to take any old computer, and load software onto it that turns it into a PBX. If all of your incoming trunks are going to be IP-based, and all of your telephones are IP-based,… [Read More]

I had a 10-year-old NEC PBX. Two analog trunks, eight or 10 digital phones, and a bunch of outlets wired for analog phones from the days in which guests needed to access their corporate networks through a modem connection. The voicemail card failed. To replace it would cost a couple of thousand dollars. I went… [Read More]

Let’s get some background and terminology out of the way first. What the heck is a PBX? The letters stand for private branch exchange: private because it is located on the customer’s premises, branch because it connects to the public switched network on one side and phones on the other side – it’s the end… [Read More]

Back in the early 80s, when was working for Rolm, having left engineering and begun a two-year tour as general manager of Office Systems Division, I used to spend a lot of time speaking at conferences. We had a lot of circuit switching data communications products and the promise of future centralized packet switching products,… [Read More]