The new PBX is not fully shaken down, but I’m far enough along that I can offer some (provisionally) final thoughts. Having an IP internal phone network and analog trunks is probably not optimum. To get all the advantages of VoIP, you want IP trunks. However, there are advantages to an IP local voice network:… [Read More]

One nice thing about IP PBXs: any computer can be a phone. NEC provides software to do just that. You have to buy a license and install it on the PBX, and after that, you just put on your headset, launch the app – which takes a minute or so to establish communications with the… [Read More]

Now that I was going back to the analog trunks, I had a voicemail problem. With only two trunks, taking an incoming call and forwarding it to cloud-based voicemail would use up all the trunks. I could have AT&T do the forwarding the way I had it set up on the old PBX, but I… [Read More]

After I decided on the NEC SV 8100 PBX, the next big decision was selecting an IP trunk vendor. In this country, Internet Protocol trunks are usually called SIP trunks, after the Session Initiation Protocol that most of them use. I looked at two choices: AT&T and Appia. The AT&T solution required replacing my existing… [Read More]

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]