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Phone System

Author: TechShortcut Staff | Article updated: June 21, 2008

3. Next Steps

Hosted phone systems offer a tremendous amount of flexibility, and they come at lower initial cost, since there is less hardware investment. However, there can be a point where the number of extensions cause the phone system service cost to exceed an in-house phone system. So, you will need to document the features your business needs, the number of planned extensions, and estimate the costs to see the real picture.

To give a bit more guidance, let's look at a few scenarios.

One Location with a Few Lines:
If you only need one phone line at one location that can be shared, then you may be able to get by with simply using one of the phone service options; you may not need a full blown phone exchange. All the options above will typically include or work with other services to provide features like call forwarding, a toll free/800 number, voicemail, faxing and conference calling.
Several Locations with Only a Few Extensions at Each:
If you have a distributed or virtual business then you will want to look into a hosted phone system service. Phone system services can be great for virtual businesses that need to route to part-time or temporary help.
One or More Locations with Many Lines:
If you have more than a few lines at each location and you want to be able to do sophisticated call routing within an office, you will want to look into both in-house or a hosted phone system and evaluate each.

	1. In-House Phone System	2. Phone System Service
General Advice	Consider when you have an office full of people needing extensions.	Consider when you need to loop in people at different locations and the number of extensions can is variable.
Find Local Tech Specialists Search TechShortcut's tech profiles for specialists in your area	"KSU-Less" Phone System KSU Phone System PBX Phone System	Virtual PBX Phone System
Find More Information Use Research Helper to find related web articles	KSU Less Phone System KSU Phone System PBX Phone System	Virtual Hosted PBX Phone System
Examples of Products and Services These are not endorsements, simply some product or service names we encountered in our research to get you started finding your best fit.	Avaya Fonality ¹ Cisco Unified Communications for Small Business Critical Links edgeBOX ¹ Microsoft Response Point NorTel ShoreTel ¹ Uses open source software from Asterisk.org	GotVMail Google GrandCentral ¹ Onebox RingCentral VirtualPBX Vocalocity ¹ Free but currently only accepting beta users.