What is a PBX?
The term PBX spawns from the original term PABX, which is an acronym for Private Automatic Branch Exchange. Essentially a PBX is a private telephony switch that resides inside the enterprise and is used for its internal employees to communicate both between themselves and the outside world. The original purpose of a PBX was to allow line pooling within an enterprise in order to grant that enterprise the ability to have more employees than telephone lines - taking advantages of the natural economies of scale that begin to occur as headcount rises.
Over time, the PBX has grown to incorporate all sorts of advanced features such as voicemail, unified messaging, auto attendant (IVR), automatic call distribution (ACD), call queuing, branch office support, telecommuters, softphones, CTI (integration with the PC), and more. With the advent of IP, the acronym PBX morphed into its latest incarnation, the IP PBX. An IP PBX is a PBX that supports packet-based transport protocols - commonly referred to as "VoIP". The most popular current protocol is SIP, which stands for "Session Initiation Protocol". Then, as the IP PBX began to rise in market share an even new label appeared called the "Hybrid IP PBX". A Hybrid IP PBX is an IP PBX that, along with VoIP, also supports legacy and analog switching protocols such as TDM. A Hybrid IP PBX will typically also support analog phones to complement its support of IP Phones. Fonality's PBXtra is a Hybrid IP PBX phone system.
What is Asterisk®?
Many people have seen the term Asterisk (either on our site or in other endeavors around the Web). So what is Asterisk? Asterisk, as used here at Fonality, is an Open Source project which essentially recreates the PBX call switching platform in a software environment. Asterisk is unique in that it is interoperable with a huge number of devices and numerous protocols, including SIP and IAX, T1, E1, ISDN, PRI, FXO, and FXS. All of these protocols are also supported by PBXtra. Asterisk is what Fonality considers the "OS of the PBX" and is responsible for much of the core call routing/switching that occurs within the PBXtra Hybrid IP PBXs.
Many customers ask us: "What is the difference between Asterisk and Fonality?". Some of Fonality's products are "based on Asterisk", by which we mean that Fonality has modified the native Asterisk PBX code to add reliability, stability and enterprise-class features. In addition, since most people prefer to manage their business and not their phone system, Fonality has built five distinct value layers over the technology that Asterisk PBX( both the native version from Digium and the modified version that comes with PBXtra) delivers at its core. They are:
1. Management Software for PBX Phone Systems
Fonality has written many layers of management software on top of the Asterisk-based phone system platform. Overall we have written in excess of 250,000 lines of code to add features on top of the Asterisk-based platform to create an easy-to-use highly functional phone system for the business customer. Some of our management software include a Web-based adminstrator software which allows business owners to maintain their PBX system from anywhere in the world with a simple web browser. Fonality also provides a web-based User Panel, which is given to each employee of the company. This User Panel allows the employee to manage their extensions from anywhere at anytime. This includes listening to voicemails, click-to-call from their call logs, call forwarding and more. Fonality also has a free Outlook integration software which provides employees Outlook contact screen pops on inbound calls, and allows them to call their contacts right from their Inbox. Finally, Fonality offers HUD pro. HUD is a real-time call control application which allows drag-and-drop calling, on-the-fly call recording, and real-time call control for inbound and outbound calls.
2. PBX for Telecommuters
Fonality makes telecommuting and mobility working a snap. Customers of PBXtra can take their IP phones home and plug them into their Broadband modem. Their extension number and voicemail will follow them. They can then make free calls, using VoIP, that route to their main office PBX. This remains true even if the main office PBX (PBXtra) is using PSTN/POTS. This means you can use PBXtra to gain the advantage of VoIP for inner and intra-office free calling, even if you aren't ready to fully commit to VoIP for all of your calling. Fonality customers can also take our softphone on the road, and make calls from anywhere. This means that you can have a distributed sales force working from around the globe all participating on the same phone system for one incredibly low price.
3. Phone Provisioning
Fonality handles the arduous task of provisioning each IP phone for interoperability with your PBX. This includes setting up a file server (TFTP) for the IP phones to download their configuration over the network, an NTP server for their clocks, and finally installing the proper firmware, bootcode, and configcode for each IP phone. Fonality ensures that each analog phone and IP phone interoperates with eachother, with the dial plan and finally with the PBX server itself. The days of "plug in the phone and it works" are long gone, as phones have become mini-computers in their own right (some even running Linux). Fonality ensures that when our IP PBX is delivered to your doorstep, the phones pop out of the box, plug in your LAN, and begin working. This is a first in the telecommunications industry!
4. PBX Phone System Monitoring
Fonality has written extensive software that monitors and maintains the health of the Asterisk-based PBX. This includes code that resides locally, as well as remotely, providing inside/outside reliability and protection of your Asterisk-based PBX.
5. LAN Interoperability
Fonality has written extensive code which ensures that your PBXtra (Asterisk based IP PBX) is a good citizen of your LAN. This includes DNS, DHCP, firewall, and routing technology to maximize performance, reliability, and scalability.
