A Little Clarification

Right off the bat, there is no easy answer for the question “what multi line phone system should I use?”. With even as few as two lines, some of the options afforded by an in house PBX system may be required for your business. Typically there is a grey zone from 7 to 10 phone extensions with a minimum of 4 phone lines where business transfer from hosted phone solutions to an in house PBX.

Services and Features:
It’s important to keep in mind the differences in services and features provided through a business phone line provider, the features of a Hosted PBX, and an on-site PBX.

1. Phone line provider will alway manage features such as Caller ID. Caller ID is information that is passed along from the telco that provides service to the person calling you. You phone systems ability to understand and translate that information depends on it’s age and options. For example, an old nortel 3×8 system will only pass on the Caller ID data to your desk phone if you’ve purchased the correct upgrade and have phones that support the feature. If you have an old Nortel system with no call display, you’re looking at spending hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars to add this functionality. completely replacing the system with either a hosted or in-house solution will likely be cheaper than upgrading the old system.
As a side note, even if you did upgrade your old system, only the new components would be covered by the warranty. if the actual system were to crash you would have no way of purchasing a new has they are no longer manufactured.

2. A hosted PBX system can offer you a myriad of features, probably more than you’ll ever use. Most often, all these features are included for free with your service.

3. An on-site PBX, specifically the MiTel MiVoice system can offer you advanced call routing, message management, multi-site integration, cell phone twining and more. Coupling this with SIP Trunking offers you a very powerful and economical telecommunication system with extraordinary extensibility.