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.

The Private Branch eXchange has gone full circle as a term. Originally having started as an organization’s manual switchboard (operated by a person plugging cables into sockets), they have evolved in to VoIP centers that are hosted by the operators or even hardware manufacturers. VOIP is an acronym for Voice Over IP, or in more common terms phone service over the Internet. If you have a reasonable quality Internet connection you can get phone service delivered through your Internet connection instead of from your local phone company. An Ethernet hard phone is a self contained IP telephone that looks just like a conventional phone but instead of a conventional phone jack, it has an Ethernet port through which it communicates directly with a VoIP server, VoIP gateway or another VoIP phone. Many people have seen the term Asterisk (either on our site or in other endeavors around the Web). So what is Asterisk? Asterisk is a free software / open-source software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX). 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. The basic Asterisk software includes many features previously only available in expensive proprietary PBX systems — voice mail, conference calling, interactive voice response (phone menus), and automatic call distribution.

Many customers ask us: "Why they just not use Asterisk since it is free instead of working with us?". Well, we believe people prefer to manage their business and not their phone system. So, for this reason we are offering value layers over the technology that Asterisk delivers at its core. They are: