For businesses who couldn’t yet afford their own PBX equipment-which took a lot of space and money-dedicated blocks of switchboards could be rented from public telephone companies to manage their internal calls. A PBX system made it faster, easier, and less expensive for businesses to handle both external and internal call volume.Ī PBX could be considered the “mother” of the modern day telephone system with humble beginnings in the early 1900s as privately-owned switchboard systems manned by operators in charge of routing interoffice calls.
The term PBX was penned in the early ‘70s to describe systems which were made up of “trunks”, or phone lines, and “stations”, or desk phones. That being said, it is valuable to understand the history of PBX and its role in the evolution of today’s robust technologies. Nowadays we use terms like IP, VoIP, or hosted to describe exactly the same thing, so the PBX tag is no longer needed. We would definitely say yes however, the number of people still inquiring about IP PBX, VoIP PBX, and Cloud PBX proves there is still some confusion.Įssentially, PBX is a legacy term used to describe a business-grade phone system designed to share lines and route calls. For years, Private Branch Exchange (PBX) was the industry standard for describing business telephone systems, but is the term now obsolete?
