Phone system (PBX)

The phone system (PBX, private branch exchange) is the equipment or service that centralizes a business's telephony: it manages several lines, distributes calls to extensions, executes forwarding, hosts voicemail boxes, puts callers on hold. Yesterday a gray box in a technical room, it's now almost always a cloud platform administered from a browser.

What a solo operator should expect from a modern system fits in five functions: conditional forwarding (on busy and no-answer — the basis of any call recovery), call waiting, voicemail with transcription, call history, and simple routing to an external agent. Everything else — complex queues, team statistics, multi-site roaming — concerns larger organizations. The classic trap is paying for a 50-person switchboard when three functions would do.