Phone systems that follow your team anywhere.

// Hosted PBX Sydney

Hosted PBX in Sydney: what you get for $33 an extension.

A hosted PBX is the phone system without the box. The part that runs extensions, transfers, voicemail, hold music and the "press 1 for sales" menu lives in a data centre, not in a cupboard at your premises. You pay per extension per month, and a change is a setting rather than a site visit. The service is delivered with our carrier partner Glue IT. The design, the porting, the handsets and the support are handled by me.

• Auto-attendant and queues. A menu that sends callers to the right person, and queues that hold and share out calls when everyone is busy. Part of the hosted PBX.
• Voicemail-to-email. A missed call lands in your inbox as a message you can hear anywhere, forward to the right person and keep on record.
• Call recording. A record of what was agreed on the phone. Useful for quotes, disputes and training.
• Softphone apps. The same extension on a desk handset, a laptop and a mobile, so home, the car and the office all ring as one number.
• Teams calling. Make and take business calls inside Microsoft Teams, alongside the desk phones and the mobile apps.
• Number porting, managed end-to-end. Your existing numbers move to the new system. I schedule it, I watch it, and if anything wobbles it is my problem, not yours.
• Room to grow. Adding an extension is a few clicks. A second site does not mean new lines, it means logging in.

Cloud PBX, hosted PBX and cloud phone system all describe the same thing: the phone system runs off-site and you rent it per extension. If a quote uses a different label, compare the extension price, the concurrent-call capacity and what is included, not the name.

// Business phone systems Sydney

Business phone systems compared: hosted PBX, on-premise, and Teams calling.

There are three ways to run a business phone system. I install and support all three, so this is not a pitch for one of them. It is the short version of the conversation we have at the free consult.

• Hosted PBX. Suits most small and medium Sydney businesses, and any team that works from more than one place. No large up-front spend: you pay per extension per month, from $33, and handsets are bought at cost plus 10 percent or skipped in favour of the app. If the internet at the office drops, the system is still up, because it was never in your building, and calls can already be routed to mobiles.
• On-premise PBX. Suits a business that wants the system on its own hardware, has stable power and internet on site, and prefers a capital purchase to a monthly fee. The up-front cost is higher and the box depreciates from the day it goes in. Copper phone lines are being retired, so a modern on-premise system still reaches the outside world over SIP channels on your internet connection. If the internet or the power drops, the box stops with it unless a divert was planned in advance.
• Teams calling. Suits a team that already lives in Microsoft 365 and Teams and wants one app for chat, meetings and calls. Calls run through Teams on laptops and mobiles, and desk handsets can sit alongside. It is quoted after the free consult rather than listed in the table, because it sits on top of your existing Microsoft 365. In an internet outage the office handsets drop like any other cloud system, and staff on mobile data keep answering.

The honest test is your busiest hour, not your average one. A plan that looks cheap and then chokes on concurrent calls, or charges per minute once you pass an allowance, costs more than a slightly dearer one that just works. Bring your current bill and I will run the numbers against each option.

// Number porting

Keeping your number: porting without dropping a call.

Your phone number is worth more than the phone system attached to it. It is on your signage, your invoices, years of Google listings and every card you ever handed out. When you switch, the number is ported: it moves from the old carrier to the new one, and once it lands it behaves like any other setting in the system. A simple standalone number usually ports in days. Numbers tangled up in bundles or older carrier products can take weeks, which is why the cutover is scheduled with overlap rather than left to luck.

A clean cutover is mostly planning. The old service and the new one overlap, so one does not die before the other wakes up. Handsets and apps are set up and tested before the switch, not on the day. Call flows, who rings first, where after-hours calls go, what the menu says, are mapped out up front. Done in that order, the change is invisible to your callers. Two things most people are never told: a number can be parked on VoIP and diverted to an announcement or a mobile for a small monthly cost while a business pauses or moves, and a number dropped in error can often be recovered if you chase it quickly, because cancelled numbers sit in quarantine before they are reissued. The full picture is in the business VoIP buyer's guide.

// Internet first

Internet first: the connection your phones depend on.

Most VoIP horror stories are network stories. Calls only sound bad when the connection underneath them is wrong, so I check the network before I quote the phones, not after the calls start dropping. Because I supply business NBN and phone plans as well as the phone system, one provider owns the whole path and nobody points fingers when a call breaks up.

• Bandwidth. Each call uses a small, steady slice of bandwidth. You do not need a huge download speed. You need a stable connection, with enough headroom for the number of calls that happen at once at your busiest hour.
• Quality of Service. A business-grade router set to treat voice as a priority, so a big file upload or a video call cannot elbow a phone call out of the way. A download that pauses for two seconds finishes two seconds later. A call that pauses for two seconds sounds broken to the customer. The phones also get their own network segment, walled off from staff laptops and guest WiFi.
• Failover. A second connection, typically 4G or 5G, that sits idle until the NBN drops and then carries the phones and the EFTPOS until it comes back. The router has to test the real internet through each link, not just the box on the wall, or the failover never fires. How to get that right is in the dual WAN failover guide.
• Power. If calls have to survive a blackout, the battery backup has to be on the right boxes: the NBN equipment, the router and the switch that powers the handsets over PoE. Otherwise the phones die with the lights.

// Indicative pricing

What it roughly costs.

Real numbers, because "contact us for pricing" is code for "brace yourself." These are honest ballparks, your fixed quote comes after a free consult.

Indicative pricing ex GST. Call rates and channel plans delivered with our carrier partner. Final quote after a free phone-bill health check, bring your current bill, I love a challenge.

A worked example: five handsets, one queue.

A five-person office that wants desk phones plus the mobile app, one main number with a menu and a queue, and enough capacity for calls to overlap. From the table above, ex GST, per month:

• Five Unified Comms extensions at $44 each: $220. Desk phone, laptop and mobile all ring as one extension.
• SIP, 4 channels: $44. Four calls can be in progress at once across the whole office, in or out.
• Direct-in-dial 10-pack: $33. Ten numbers, so the main line and a direct number for each person all fit.

That is $297 a month before calls. Calls are either PAYG at 11 cents, 18 cents and 28 cents a minute for local-national, mobile and 1300, or $77 per channel per month for unlimited national calling under fair use. The same office on plain hosted PBX extensions at $33, without the desktop and mobile apps, comes to $242 a month. Handsets are quoted per model at cost plus 10 percent, and setup and porting are quoted up front. Auto-attendant, queues, voicemail-to-email and call recording are part of the hosted PBX.

// Questions

VoIP, your questions answered.

// Pairs well with