What is a hosted PBX?

A hosted PBX is your phone system running in a provider's data centre rather than on a box in your comms cupboard. It does the same job the old system did, routing calls, holding queues, taking messages, without hardware to buy, maintain or eventually replace.

PBX simply means private branch exchange, the equipment that connected a business's internal phones to the outside world. For decades that was a physical unit on a wall, configured by a technician who had to attend the site to change anything, and replaced every so often at considerable expense. Hosted moves the same function to software someone else runs, which changes three things that matter.

Changes become immediate rather than a service call. Adjusting your after-hours message, adding a person, changing where calls route at lunchtime, all of it happens through a web portal in minutes. Second, location stops mattering: staff can work from anywhere with the same number and the same features, which was awkward and expensive to arrange on legacy systems. Third, the refresh cycle disappears, since there is no hardware to age out and no forced replacement project every several years.

The trade is the one that comes with anything hosted: you depend on your internet connection, so it needs a failover path, and you rely on a provider's platform rather than your own equipment. For nearly every small business that is a good trade, because the reliability of a well-run platform comfortably exceeds a box in a cupboard nobody has patched since installation. If you still have an on-site PBX and are wondering what replacing it looks like, call 1800 456 567.