With NBN now available in the majority of Australia, copper networks are about to be mostly defunct; with it the onsite PABX (Private Automatic Branch Exchange) systems.
In this age of cloud, most onsite PABX systems in the SME market will need be upgraded and/or moved. If you are a business and NBN is live in your area, you will receive a letter from Telstra (in partnership with NBN) stating the disconnection of copper services (ISDN and PSTN) to your building.
This is a good time to take a look at what technologies are out there for your business and take advantage of some of the new age technology for your team. The old systems will be depriving your team of some of the features that will help them be more productive in their jobs.
In this article we compare traditional systems with some new age technology available.
Single point of failure – onsite systems have a single ‘server’ supplying all the phones. Although they don’t have many moving parts, they are electronic devices and can fail at any time. This will result in ALL the phones being down in your office. The impact could be massive if your business relies on incoming phone calls.
If this was a cloud based system (backed by a known cloud phone system provider) all services in their cloud would be redundant and chances of it failing is far less than an onsite system.
Costs – onsite systems have a far higher implementation cost than cloud systems. Not to mention the upkeep and power costs going forward.
With hosted telephone systems, you have no box on site, just the handsets on your desk – saving your organisation power costs and also space in your office. Hosted systems also have per second billing rather than the traditional 30 second flag fall from Telstra and Optus. This means you will pay for exactly how much you use rather than being billed in blocks, saving you money on a daily basis.
Support for old systems – as time goes by, some of the old phone systems are so obsolete that parts are no longer available for it nor do any providers have the expertise to rectify issues when they occur. Sometimes, either the handsets or the PABX system is out of date, which results in the new phones not being compatible with the old systems.
VoIP phones are compatible with any hosted phone system making moving providers a straight forward and painless experience.
Features – Most old onsite systems have a limited feature set available to users. Systems that can be upgraded require an engineer to come to site to upgrade the software or hardware (or both). This results in downtime and further costs.
With cloud systems, features are sometimes released daily and can be rolled out instantly to thousands of phones instantaneously with a simple restart of your desk phone.
Scalability – Onsite systems have a limit of the number of handsets that can be added before you have to upgrade the board in the PABX. Some systems even have a cap on the number of handsets, which means you have to upgrade the whole system before you can add new users.
With cloud systems you can add tens or hundreds (or thousands if you really want) of handsets instantly making any solution highly scalable to grow with your business.
There is no doubt that implementing new technology will help you and your team work more efficiently and make them productive. It will also save you hundreds or even thousands in phone costs over the years.
