I’m a baby boomer, so I grew up with a house phone, a.k.a. “land line.” I’ll never be without one! But I recently took a closer look at our current phone service, and realized I could design something with much more functionality, at a much cheaper cost, and without a lot of effort. So what did I do?
1) Stood up a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) in the cloud
2) Ported my existing phone number to a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider
3) Plugged my cordless phone into an analog telephone adapter (ATA), and connected this to my PBX via my broadband link
And there you have it! After a few easy steps – so easy you’ll be able to do it too! – I had transformed my old fashioned house phone into a modern telecommunication device at a fraction of the cost of our traditional land line service.
Using the PBX I can now create special “apps”, accessible via extensions, that can do all sorts of things: play podcasts, send texts, call up Alexa or ChatGPT, and even place takeout orders! And it’s not just our cordless handsets that can be connected to the platform: so can our computers, tablets, and mobile phones, as well as our family’s and friends’ devices. And because the PBX is video-enabled, it’s possible to place video calls between any devices with a video interface. While the Internet handles communication between devices that are local to the PBX, the VoIP line is used to make or accept calls from the traditional phone networks. And unlike our our old land line that could only handle one call at a time, our new VoIP number can initiate and accept multiple calls simultaneously, so it truly can be shared by everyone on the PBX without ever getting a busy signal!
Now that’s what I call phone service!