The Changing Face of the Business Phone System

The business phone system has evolved. If you didn’t know that before work from home, you know it now. If you have been on a Unified Communication system, you have been able to communicate in a variety of ways. And you found out while voice is an important element of the business phone system, voice is simply one of the ways you communicate with other people in a business environment today, and that is all supported within a UC business phone system. Voice is essential, but no longer unique. We communicate with other employees or customers via instant and group messaging, email, social media and the like.

When viewing the architecture diagram of a basic PBX office phone system, one can see four important elements. There are interfaces that connect to the “outside world” networks via “trunks” that come into the building. In “the old days”, which is only a few years ago really, this was simply a PSTN trunk to the wired and wireless PSTN, internet or wireless networks. Today this also includes SIP trunks connected to these same networks.

There are also interfaces that connect to whatever device one talks on. Again, in “the old days” that was simply a phone on your desk, or maybe a paging system, conference phone or intercom to the front door. Today, there are all kinds of softphones, or clients connected to your various mobile devices, including your watch.

The business phone system also has a database of users (phone numbers, etc.) and rules on how to route calls. Finally, there is a message broker which manages the interaction between internal and external devices and follows the rules set out by the system itself and the administrator of the business phone system.

Next week we’ll take a look at how the architecture has evolved to easily add Unified Communication features.

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