subject: Can Voip Help Me? [print this page] A PBX is a customer premise business phone system which in years past was called a Private Branch Exchange or PBX. A PBX manages telephones (extensions) throughout the enterprise (business) and acts as a Switch for voice calls.
A PBX that uses VoIP (Voice over IP) technologies is called an IP-PBX. These VoIP technologies are used to carry the voice and control information from one location to another.
While an IP-PBX will have the same basic set of call features and functionality as a traditional or legacy PBX, it may also have several additional features such as the ability to automatically redirect callers to the location of any user, the use of soft phones, call screening, etc.
Most older phone systems cannot offer find me/follow me, personalized call screening and presence detection.
One large misconception about VoIP technologies is that its "free." While common sense tells us that nothing is free, the frequently claimed notion that your voice traffic can just be added to your current data traffic using the same network is, for the most part, misleading and needs to be thought out before being accepted as "realistic."
The calculations for Bandwidth utilization when utilizing VoIP are beyond the scope of this article. It is usually a good idea to think of needing 80Kb per conversation though this does depend on how your VoIP equipment is set up. To get a good idea, you will need to estimate the maximum number of simultaneous phone conversations expected.
One of the problems when using VoIP is that older network equipment doesn't understand what VoIP traffic is. There are certain pieces of information that VoIP sends along with the voice information that informs your network switches and routers that the traffic needs to be a higher priority than plain data.
The organization of your network devices can also play an important role in the delivery of reliable VoIP based voice traffic. Understanding the number and age of your network equipment is important to knowing if that equipment could cause voice quality issues.
Most businesses don't have that many devices on their LAN that are in between any two talking extensions. This means that the number of devices is typically not a major concern but should always be checked.
Can you use your existing network data connections for your voice traffic? Sometimes. If your business does a lot of heavy movement of data, such as downloads or uploads to or from the Internet or moving or printing large files, then you might want to consider either using a separate LAN or using your legacy telephone wiring as the other LAN for your voice traffic.
Existing telephone wiring may work fine as a separate network if it is Cat 5 or better wiring and you change the connectors from the typical RJ11 to RJ45. Only some testing will tell for sure.
Navigating your way through this new VoIP world can seem difficult and is the reason telephone system resellers have people to answer questions. Don't assume you shouldn't or don't need to ask questions when it comes to VoIP phone systems. None of us has all the answers. But working together, we do find solutions.
