Traditional and virtual PBX: conservatism versus innovation

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At the same time, the issue of its organization never loses its relevance: the number of employees grows, a new branch opens or an old one moves. In such cases, a traditional PBX requires large financial and time costs: it is necessary to purchase new telephone numbers, connect the station, and often it will be necessary to lay additional communication lines.

Many businessmen know about this routine firsthand.

Meanwhile, not all companies are in a hurry to abandon lithuania phone numbers traditional PBX and switch to more advanced virtual analogues. Why? There are several reasons for this, but first of all, it is the conservatism of managers. Russian entrepreneurs have not yet fully realized that the transition to a new generation of telephony is simple, convenient and opens up many interesting opportunities, as well as eliminates unnecessary costs (time and financial).

However, a steady decline in demand for traditional PBXs in the US and Europe has been observed over the past 3-4 years. Since 2013, an active decline in demand has also begun in Russia. Let's try to compare these two types of telephone communication.


Already at the first stage of analysis, the classic PBX begins to lose to its young competitor. The cost of equipment is several times higher, and in addition to the phone itself, it will also require laying a cable and purchasing the required number of external telephone channels and numbers. The launch time for such an infrastructure will be from one to several weeks.
To organize a virtual PBX in the office, you only need to buy phones and install the Internet. Specialists will cope with this task in a few days at most.


A competent IT specialist is required to service a traditional PBX. You will either have to hire him or sign an outsourcing agreement. In any case, this is an additional expense item. At the same time, even high-quality expensive equipment quickly becomes obsolete. Consequently, after some time, the IT specialist will definitely require the manager to allocate funds for repairing the old or purchasing new equipment.

Connection and setup of a virtual PBX (PBX) is carried out by the provider. There are no major difficulties in the process of work: any employee of the company will be able to set up this PBX with the existing resources of the company (Internet, mobile phones) on their own.


The capabilities of traditional PBXs are not very diverse: the standard set consists of incoming and outgoing calls, IVR, voice mail, call forwarding and interception. Expanding capabilities will require significant expenses from the company. A virtual PBX, in turn, initially has a wider range of capabilities. In particular, its network is easier to scale, since the equipment and numbers are not tied to a geographic location. For virtual telephony, there is no fundamental difference between installing another device in the office or connecting another office in another city. Additional numbers can be connected in a few minutes.

PBX allows you to stay in touch not only in the office: any call can be forwarded to the mobile or home number of the required employee. Another advantage is the fact that with virtual numbers you can easily and painlessly move the company from place to place - all numbers are saved.

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Most IP telephony providers offer very attractive prices for outgoing local, long-distance and international calls. On average, the savings on calls when switching to PBX will be about 20%, in some cases from 30 to 70%. This happens for the following reasons:

Providers use relatively complex schemes, reducing communication costs through economies of scale and Internet telephony.
“Healthy” competitive environment.
What are the real disadvantages of virtual communication? There are none as such, because virtual telephony is a new stage in the development of telecom. This is evidenced by the outstripping pace of development of the industry compared to the rest of the telecommunications market. It will be economically inexpedient to install a PBX only for very large enterprises. For example, Gazprom has its own Gazprom Telecom and it is profitable for them to do everything on their own. For small and medium-sized enterprises (up to 100-150 people), PBX is the optimal choice in 99 cases out of 100.

Audio signal transmission technologies in PBX are no different from traditional solutions. The quality of communication provided by an adequate provider does not cause any comments and is indistinguishable or even better than traditional telephony.

Regarding reliability, it would be foolish to try to say that VATS operate 100% uninterrupted. This is equipment, plus we should not forget about the human factor, so breakdowns and errors happen, but:

in traditional telephony, such breakdowns cannot be avoided either;
a team of specialists from a PBX provider, as a rule, can solve a problem faster than one, even an experienced IT specialist;
If problems arise, the client can be transferred to other servers and channels, that is, if the entire system does not fail at the same time, most likely, the company will not even notice any errors on the part of the provider.
As for the efficiency of the “own specialist” – “third-party technical support” group, we can say the following: the VATS market is quite competitive, new players appear every two to three months. Companies are simply forced to hone their service in order to survive, so most likely, technical support will treat the client as a Client with a capital letter.

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The primary (and, in fact, the only) argument against PBX remains the myth that telephony is not very important. As long as it works, there is no point in paying attention to it in principle. Managers do not understand what opportunities for reducing the workload of employees, increasing the speed and quality of service are hidden behind a simple telephone. In this situation, I would like to recall the famous words of the writer Anatole France: "I live in the age of airplanes and do not yearn for airships."