General Questions About Lines

[brhale21]

I'm a small business owner and am quite new to the PBX / VoIP stuff but I'm trying to set myself up with a professional type system without breaking the bank. Here are my questions:

 

Do you have to have a seperate phone line for each person simultaneously talking on the phone? For instance, say we have 2 phones / extensions and 1 phone line. The auto-attendant would take an incoming call and the caller would get transferred to the first extension. Could another call come in and get transferred to the second extension?

 

800 numbers and keeping your current number would depend on the gateway service I assume.

 

If both extensions are busy can you set it up to put the caller directly on hold until an extension opens up?

 

I know they're pretty basic questions but I couldn't find the answers in the documentation so if someone wouldn't mind posting or pointing me towards a helpful link that would be great!

 

Thanks in advance

[gllincoln]

Hi,

 

Extensions are how many telephones/handsets (virtual or real) that you have. This represents how many different locations/places/stations can access the PBX.

 

Concurrent *internal* calls (extension to extension) are limited mostly by the processing power available to the server to handle the codec translations and the general UDP traffic required to process the calls.

 

Concurrent *external* calls equal the number of phone lines (virtual or POTS or SIP ports, or whatever) that you have available. So - if you have an incoming call from beyond your PBX - that's line one. If you want to place that person on hold and call someone on a local extension - still one line. If you want to call someone beyond your local PBX, then that would require a second line. If you have someone (external call) on hold, are placing an external call, and you want to have callers able to call into your PBX at the same time - then you need a 3rd line, and so forth.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Good luck,

Gordon

 

 

I'm a small business owner and am quite new to the PBX / VoIP stuff but I'm trying to set myself up with a professional type system without breaking the bank.  Here are my questions:

 

Do you have to have a seperate phone line for each person simultaneously talking on the phone?  For instance, say we have 2 phones / extensions and 1 phone line.  The auto-attendant would take an incoming call and the caller would get transferred to the first extension.  Could another call come in and get transferred to the second extension?

 

800 numbers and keeping your current number would depend on the gateway service I assume.

 

If both extensions are busy can you set it up to put the caller directly on hold until an extension opens up?

 

I know they're pretty basic questions but I couldn't find the answers in the documentation so if someone wouldn't mind posting or pointing me towards a helpful link that would be great!

 

Thanks in advance 

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