Hosted Pbx, Is It For You? In One Word, Yes!

By Author: ambrozy
Total Articles: 10
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Many office telephone systems these days require certain flexibility in order for them to be beneficial to the organisation. Not long ago, PBX systems were commonly used by medium to large organisations for their phone systems. The benefits included reduced charges for local calls as well as unique features like hunt groups, call forwarding, and extension dialling which it not normally available on operators network. Thought desirable, PBX systems were generally too expensive to deploy for small companies and this is where Hosted PBX systems come into play.
Hosted PBX phone systems deliver same features-set (sometimes more) as a PBX system but without the hassle of buying and managing the hardware yourself. Attraction for PBX as a service was great as organisations could leave the managing of the phone systems to a hosted PBX service provider and could spend those resources on the their core business instead. Adding additional users is also much easier as there is no need to buy extra hardware, you simply call your service provider and request another user licence and its done. Same goes for someone leave and you need ...
... to reduce the number of users on the system, in addition no expensive hardware resourced are wasted when someone leaves.
One other benefit of Hosted PBX over standard PBX systems is that it might provide more features than a PBX system as the software and hardware is regularly upgraded by the service provider. In the early years, some feature were made available to hosted PBX services long before they were introduced in non hosted environment. The PBX functionality as a service can be delivered over a standard PSTN or over the internet (referred to as VoIP service or voice over IP).
As with everything, there are some drawbacks to the hosted PBX. One of the main issues revolves around call quality. This is due to the fact that when using voice over IP, calls may be sent through the public internet which can be busy at times causing bandwidth issue resulting in bad call quality. Bandwidth is also a limiting factor from the business premises to the exchange. A certain number of voice calls can be carried over a given amount of bandwidth. This limits the expandability of the office phone system as at some point it might be cheaper to have a PBX in the office than to pay for more bandwidth for a Hosted PBX system. Service providers such as Voxalis overcome these issues by using their own fully managed voice only IP networks for connection to their data centres.
In conclusion, Hosted PBX systems are not only can save you money on costly hardware, it can also save you money on local/internal calls. There is no hassle of upgrading the system hardware or software and management is very easy through an online portal provided by the service provider. All of these advantages make the hosted PBXservice much more desirable compared to a non hosted PBX, especially for a small to medium size businesses.