A PBX — Private Branch Exchange — is the system that manages your business's internal and external phone calls. It's what gives you extensions, lets you transfer calls between colleagues, puts callers on hold with music, and routes incoming calls to the right person or department.
Traditionally, a PBX was a physical box — either in your office or in a BT exchange — connected to ISDN lines. It worked, but it was expensive to install, costly to maintain, difficult to change and entirely dependent on those ISDN lines to function.
A hosted PBX does exactly the same job, but the hardware lives in a secure data centre rather than your office. You access it over your broadband connection. Your phones — desk phones, mobile apps or computer softphones — connect to it over the internet. And when you need to make a change, add a user or update your call routing, it's done through an online portal rather than calling an engineer.
For businesses currently on an ISDN-connected PBX system, a hosted PBX is the most natural like-for-like replacement — you keep all the features your team relies on, and gain new ones you didn't have before.
