Digital telephone systems

January 2008

Digital telephone systems are based on computer technology, rather than older 'analogue' technology. Being digital means that they have much wider functionality and crucially, they can take advantage of the internet.

The first set of benefits come from being able to extend your office telephone system into your home-offices and branch offices. This means:

• All calls made between locations are treated as internal calls and are free of charge

• All calls made from home-offices and branch offices are routed through your company telephone system and are billed centrally on the corporate tariff

• Everything you can do on your telephones within the office can be done on your telephones on the extended network. Many digital telephone systems offer 'phone management', which typically includes:
  • on-screen logs of calls made, missed calls and call duration
  • call divert to another extension or a mobile phone
  • corporate and personal voice-mail, including voicemail to email alerts

• Phone management systems typically also give your staff the ability to hot-desk, so you can redirect your personal extension to another location within the office or elsewhere on the network

• And crucially, telephone calls made between home-offices or branch offices, and your clients and other callers, work and sound the same as calls from within the office.

Secondly, all telephones, both inside the office and within home-offices and branch offices, are connected across the internet. This means that:

• Within your offices, you don't need a separate wiring circuit for the telephone system, since it runs off the existing computer cabling

• The same applies for branch offices and home offices: any number of digital telephone extensions can be set up using the cables or wireless connections already in place for your computers

Finally, since this kind of telephone system is based on computing technology, setting them up and maintaining them requires experience with computers.

To find out more about how First Line can help your business benefit from improved workforce mobility, please contact us.