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Overview of Different Types of Phone Systems
A PBX (Private Branch eXchange) is essentially an automatic switchboard for telephone systems. It provides the same basic functions for any business or enterprise that the ranks of telephone operators with handfuls of wiring plugs did that you will remember seeing in old movies. Those essential features are to provide switching and connection between any two (or more) telephone users and make sure the connection remains in place until it is ended, at which point the system properly terminates the connection.
Any system that does this automatically for telephone calls within an organization is a PBX. The reason businesses move to PBXes is to avoid requiring every employee to have a direct line to the public telephone system, each of which incurs a connection and a line charge. Instead, a smaller number of lines get shared by all the users and managed by the PBX. This saves money and is more efficient.
About Asterisk and IP PBX Phone Systems
Asterisk is a complete open source PBX (Private Branch eXchange) telecommunications platform. The most common implementation is as a premise-based IP PBX which is the modern heir to the historic PBX systems that were the ultimate in business communications for the past thirty years. But premise-based IP PBX systems are cheaper and far more capable than their predecessors. They also integrate much better into business networks and data communications which, in turn, enable new applications that are still being discovered and applied to common business practices.
Modern premise-based IP PBX systems literally deliver multinational enterprise capabilities to even small businesses, often at a cost lower than the far more basic systems they are replacing.
Basic Asterisk Features
In addition to all of the normal PBX features of call switching, call completion, call connection, call termination and basic accounting that any PBX system must have, the basic features found in any Asterisk system should include:
- Automated attendant – an automatic system to answer phones with the ability to build phone menu systems, add call menus, transfer to voicemail and create flexible and programmable rules to handle all of these features.
Advanced Asterisk Features
Depending business needs there are many more advanced features which can make up part of an Asterisk telephone system. Some examples of these advanced features include:
- Call routing – setting up programmed rules to route calls appropriately based on flexible criteria like caller ID or time or even next available extension in the designated call management group.