Take a step back 5 – 10 years when the likes of Avaya, Mitel and Siemens were your best bet for an office phone system and you would be facing a bill of 10-20k for hardware alone. Once you have factored in other costs such as ongoing maintenance and licensing it will be considerably higher – plus you have a very limited choice of phones (if any) as they are usually proprietary to the respective vendors phone system to maintain the “lock-in”.
3CX is simply a software VoIP phone system (PBX) that can be installed on any Windows based server/PC and the only cost is a one-off licence purchase for the system itself. 3CX is compatible with most VoIP phones on the market such as Snom, Polycom, Grandstream, Yealink and many more. The licencing model is simple and is based on the number of simultaneous calls that you require at any one time; pricing can be found at https://sphereit.uk/buy-3cx-licences/. Generally speaking, a site with ~20 phone extensions will manage perfectly fine with the small business edition (8 simultaneous calls) which at the cost of £479.99 is a small fraction of the price in comparison to many other competitors.
3CX is truly scalable, very configurable and includes the typical features of any other PBX such as ring groups, DDIs, Digital Receptionist, IVR and also call recording and voicemail to email which in many cases competitors would charge additional licenses for. The phone system can be administered on the local server using the windows console or via http from a remote PC using any web browser.
Nowadays the most cost effective solution for calling is to use a SIP VoIP provider which registers a logical route back to the SIP providers endpoint which are called “SIP Trunks”. SIP trunks can utilise any of your internet connections to register back and it is all IP based so no analogue lines need to be terminated into the PBX. Depending on the size of your business, the best bet is to have a dedicated ADSL connection for the voice or use QoS on your router to ensure optimal quality. For those of you who are still in long contracts with the likes of BT for your ISDN30 line you can use a ISDN to SIP gateway such as Patton to convert the ISDN signal to SIP and vice versa. Once the time comes you can simply port your numbers over to a SIP provider and have this already registered on the same 3CX server to enable a seamless transition.
In additional to offering the entire 3CX range for sale, Sphere IT can supply and install a 3CX system for your business from scratch or project manage the transition from an existing system from start to finish. If you would like to discuss how 3CX can help your business, please contact us.
