From Hosted PBX to Hybrid-Hosted PBX

Hosted PBX systems often seem like a great deal for many businesses to get a phone system up and running quickly, easily, and cheaply. However, there are a number of considerations with hosted solutions that you should be aware of before making your purchase. Fonality offers both a hosted and a best-of-both-worlds Hybrid-Hosted solution to meet every business need.

What is Hosted PBX?

Hosted PBX (or IP Centrex) is a new approach to the PBX market that allows businesses to outsource their IP PBX to a service provider. Hosted PBX provides a number of advantages over the legacy PBX switch:

• Your 4 digit extension follows you wherever you travel
• You save on long distance with low-cost VoIP
• It’s telecommuter and mobile worker friendly

However, there are a number of things to consider when using a hosted PBX service. Below, we discuss the three most important considerations.

Consideration #1: Hosted May Mean Dropped Calls

Using a hosted PBX means that all of your telephone calls travel over the public Internet — the same public Internet that tends to slow during peak traffic hours. These slowdowns are barely noticed when you browse or download email, but these momentary lapses may cause VoIP calls to sound very poor, or get dropped. It is very important that you make sure that your network, and bandwidth, are sufficient in order to handle your call volumes. If you're considering a hosted solution, be sure to ask a Fonality sales representative to help you evaluate your network!

Consideration #2: Hosted May Be More Expensive

Let's talk cost. At first glance it may seem that a hosted solution will save you a lot of money. But does it really? Since the average business keeps its phone system for about five years, we can easily compute what a hosted PBX will really cost you:

20-employee scenario: $25/mo. x 20 employees x 5 years = $30,000!

It's exactly this reason that Fonality allows you to start with a hosted PBX and then, when you're ready, migrate to a premise-based (or "server-based") PBX.

Consideration #3: Hosted May Mean Less Features

When you use a hosted PBX service your business shares a remote server with hundreds, and often thousands, of other businesses. Many high-end PBX features are computationally expensive thus requiring many dedicated server resources. If you dig deeply into the feature-set, you will notice that most hosted providers lack a number of important PBX features such as automatic call distribution, call recording, conference bridges, call barging, presence management, unified messaging, and powerful reporting, just to name a few. Fonality is the only company that offers almost every single feature from our premise version in our hosted version: the choice is yours!

Fonality's Hybrid-Hosted IP PBX is the Best of Both Worlds

Don’t panic! While you can easily start with Fonality's hosted solution (or even trial it) with little to no risk, we also have our full, time-tested hybrid-hosted IP-PBX solution that provides you the reliability and feature set of an on-premise PBX along with the flexibility and long distance savings of a hosted PBX. Fonality's on-premise version of PBXtra allows you to:

• Seamlessly blend VoIP and PSTN for low-cost, reliable communications
• Benefit from patent-pending telecommuter technology
• Talk between branch offices without paying long distance
• Give your telecommuters the ability to communicate with headquarters for free
• Take your phone anywhere and your 4-digit extension will follow
• Use a soft-phone while at home or on the road
• Build a distributed call center and save on rent
• And much more

The best news is the price. For less than a thousand dollars, Fonality provides you with a premise-based solution, PBXtra, and our powerful PBXtra software. Consider that in comparison to the $30,000 price tag we quoted above and you will find that, whatever your budget, Fonality has the right solution for you!

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