Key Differences Between a Hosted PBX and a Premise-Based Phone System
February 13th, 2012 by admin
Is your business considering a new phone system? Have you heard of hosted PBX service or Virtual PBX's? The trend today for many companies is to consider going with a Hosted VoIP solution rather than purchasing a traditional premise-based phone system. But you may be asking yourself what are the differences?
The main difference between the two is that with a premise-based phone system or PBX you purchase or lease a cabinet or server, a processor and all of the interface cards to support your phone lines coming into your business and your phone sets. With a Hosted Voice over IP Private Branch Exchange (Hosted VoIP PBX), your system is an Internet based phone system connected to a private branch exchange system which is hosted, or managed by a third party.
Because a Hosted VoIP phone system is managed by a third party the PBX system is often located in a remote and safe location opposed to a business' premise. In addition, many times the hosted VoIP PBX provider is also a VoIP service provider. Businesses often value hosted VoIP PBX systems because they are more hands-off than IP-PBX systems, as everything is managed by the hosting company. With a hosted solution, typically you only need to purchase the phones and a router.
Some of the key benefits to going with a hosted solution are:
- Significant upfront cost savings
- Easily scalable
- Supported by outside technical staff which can also save internal IT staffing costs
- Remote Offices and Workers can be easily connected to each other so they can take and place calls to each as if they were in the same building as long as they have internet bandwidth
- Business Continuity offering redundancy and disaster recovery
- Advanced features are available and updated as new software versions are released
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