Office Products - Telephones and Communication Accessories

Office products like telephones and communication accessories have been the cornerstone of modern business technology. The computer has been turned into an almost obsolete machine without the ability to reach the internet or use the newest telephonic wizardry. Today there is more traffic on the world wide web via mobile devices than there are computers hooked up to the Internet.

These are a few of the more important developments that have revolutionized the realm of new telephone and communication technologies.

Audio Conferencing or Audio Tele-Conferencing

Conference calling is a telephone call where the caller may have the audio of an incoming call be listened to by multiple parties, they already having been patched into the audio conference. The called parties may only be able to listen in and not speak, or they may have the ability to actively participate during the call. This is loosely defined as audio tele-conferencing (or ATC). When using conference calling there may be a special device in the room allowing audio to be heard throughout an office from several feet in any direction or greater range.

Companies using audio conferencing will usually have a service provider that is the creator of a conference bridge, or a special device for linking of telephone lines. The participants can use the conference bridge to get access to an ongoing conference call by dialing a specific telephone number for connection to the conference and possibly a PIN code. This is much more advanced than when it first evolved with analog signals.

PBX Phone Systems

Private Branch Exchange (or PBX) is a private network for telephones within any company. PBX phone systems allow users to share multiple outside telephone lines. A PBX system connects all of a businesses internal telephones and connects them for external phone calls also. All phones have access to the public switched telephone network (or PSTN) which is usually maintained by the company itself. Today there four basic options for PBX systems.

They are known by their names as PBX, Hosted/Virtual PBX, IP PBX, and Hosted/Virtual IP PBX. Internet Protocol transmission of calls or IP PBX is a software driven PBX phone system. It is a solution to task management and delivery of certain services which normally can be made difficult to support with ordinary PBX systems. It also is much less expensive to add in most business situations.

VoIP

Voice over Internet Protocol (also known as Voice over IP, or VoIP) is internet related transmission technologies and communication protocols specifically for delivering voice and multimedia over IP networks. Any time you hear the terms Internet telephony, broadband telephony, or broadband phone; these are synonyms referring to VoIP. Internet telephony is anything that is a communications service provided over the internet including voice calling, fax, SMS, or messaging requiring access to a PSTN, as with PBX phone systems.

In simplest terms VoIP uses IP protocols to break a voice signal into audio codecs which encode the signal as digital audio over an IP network and does this via what is called an audio stream. The common uses of VoIP in technology today are Mobile VoIP, Software VoIP, and IP Phones. VoIP is what allows you to still make calls or send text messages if you have a portable device that connects via any WiFi or 3G network. There is more to this technology than meets the eye.