What Is a Virtual PBX®?

Summary: An Explanation of the Virtual PBX® Concept

A standard PBX or business phone system is a physical switch which connects a company's internal phone system to other phones in that system and to the public telephone network. It is typically located in a "phone closet" on the business premises and must be purchased, programmed for its functions, and maintained. Since it depends on the power system to function, a loss of the electrical power will result in the phone system also failing. Often to take advantage of all of the features, special phones must be purchased for each extension location. Since the switch is "hard wired" to each extension, external phones or cell phones cannot easily be extensions. This means that outside employees cannot be reached by dialing the main company number or can only be connected at some expense and difficulty or by the loss of an incoming line for each outside extension while it is talking.

A Virtual PBX® by contrast is located in our computer equipment at our Point of Presence (POP) in the general telephone network. Thus there is no equipment on the customer's premisses, and the extension phones are ordinary (non-business) telephones or cell phones. If the electric power fails at the customer's location, all ordinary phones and cell phones continue to function. If the power fails at our location, we have backup power so that no electrical power failure can take down a customer's phone system.

So How Does a Virtual PBX® Work?

A customer who subscribes to our service is given an 800, 888, or 877 toll-free number as his main business number; or if he already has his own phone number, it can be either ported or remote-call forwarded to the equipment in our POP. When someone places a call to this number, he is greeted by an auto-attendant. If the caller knows the extension of the party he wishes to speak with, he dials it at once and is connected to that person no matter where he is in the world. If he does not know the extension but does know the parties name, he can spell it in the company directory and be connected to the extension. If he does not know the name of anyone in the company; our system allows users to define sales, customer support, tech support, etc. queues; and by pressing the corresponding menu item, the caller can be connected to someone in that queue who can help him. If he so desires, he can also press 0 and get a live operator.

This Is Implemented as Follows:

Each company extension can store up to four contact phone numbers; and when someone calls in an dials that extension, our equipment tries each contact phone number until the extension owner is found. A contact phone number can be a phone at the extension owner's desk, his home phone, a cell phone, or even a phone in his hotel room if he is traveling on business.

Normally, the contact phone numbers would be the phone on his desk and his cell phone, but as illustrated above this can be changed to take advantage of temporary situations.

Management of the contact phone numbers and other features of the system should be simple and easy. For example: VirtualPBX.com provides both hidden phone menus and web management. Sample web-management pages can be viewed at Sample Extension Web-Management Page or Sample System-Administrator Web-Management Page. (Look under the hood. Kick the tires.)

The VirtualPBX.com's system has all to the features of the most expensive high-end PBXs such as voice or fax mail, music or messages on hold, new-message paging which functions as the "message light" for new mail, and many more. (See also the features page.)

One of the very important features of the Virtual PBX® is Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) queues. This allows a company to define sales or customer support queues or even to create an in-bound call center at very nominal expense. Because the PBX is virtual, the sales queue people, the call center attendants, etc. can be anywhere. They can work from home, from their desks at the company, from vehicles, or while traveling on company business. The way that this works is that when someone logs into an ACD queue, calls to that queue are sent "round robin" to those employees who are logged into the queue on that particular day. For example in real estate offices,one sales person is often appointed to take "cold calls" for that day. It is not necessary for that person to remain in the office waiting for the phone to ring. He can be out and about, on tour, showing homes to prospective clients, or simply at home resting. It is the ACD queues are one of the reasons that our Virtual PBX® is a powerful business friendly system.

Since an employee with a cell phone can always be reached, "telephone tag" is eliminated with the Virtual PBX®. In fact it is possible to have a business which uses only cell phones for the extension phones instead of "hard wired" extension phones on an employee's desk. See the tutorial All Cell-Phone Business Phone System - A New Concept For 2000 and Beyond.

The insensitivity of a Virtual PBX® to power outages was dramatically demonstrated on Tuesday, December 8, 1998, when the electrical power for all of San Francisco and its peninsula as far south as Mountain View failed for six hours. Every business in this large area; which had a standard PBX or, for that matter, any type of multiline, etc. phone which depended on the electrical power to function; lost its phone system for the duration of the outage unless they also had backup power. But our customers both in the San Francisco area and nation wide continued to have functioning phone service as if nothing had happened.

Humorously when we tried to order pizza at noon, our favorite pizza parlour was without phone service, and we had to wait until about 3 PM to eat. When the lady finally arrived with our pizzas, she said that as soon as the power came back on, the phone began to ring off of the wall as all of the hungry customers began to place their orders. Since her oven burned wood she could easily have served people throughout the outage if only her phones had worked. She just had a four-line phone which plugged into the wall socket, but that was enough to put her out of business for 6 hours.

An electrical power outage, however, is not the only way that a standard PBX, can fail. A backhoe may accidently cut the phone cables at the business location, the electronics in the PBX switch may fail, a computer system can crash, a fire can destroy the premises or the "phone closet", natural disasters such as floods or hurricanes, or something as mundane as a Y2K bug in the PBX switch can take the phone system down. VirtualPBX.com has a solution for this problem which works for any company but is especially relevant for large companies with hundreds or thousands of extensions in their system. It is called the PBX Parachute. What we do is to mirror a company's phone system to the extent that they believe necessary (i.e. the important extensions necessary to continue operation) with employees extension phones, cell phones, home phones, executive-suite direct lines, etc. If the phone system fails for any reason, in-coming calls can be quickly switched to the switch at our POP, and business continues uninterrupted.