Despite the development of various other methods of interpersonal communication, verbal communication remains the most effective. Therefore, tools that enable its efficient operation constitute an extremely important element of every organization’s strategic resources. The needs for remote voice communication are met by various types of paid telephony services, provided either by specialized public service providers – telecommunications operators, or by private telephone systems – meeting the needs of local communication within the organization, usually limited in range to its headquarters. Thanks to connections with public telephony provider systems, private telephone systems also allow their users to communicate with other users of public telephony provider systems. The fundamental difference between public and private telephony systems (besides the operating range).
Is the cost of usage. The cost of using a public operator’s services to provide local internal communication for an organization is incomparably higher than investing in a private telephone system, whose internal use does not involve fees. Investments in traditional private telephone systems involve the purchase of call switching devices – PBX (Private Branch Exchange) telephone exchanges, appropriate telephone sets for users, and telephone cabling infrastructure, and for larger systems, often additionally with expenditures on specialized knowledge used to manage the system and system maintenance services. Besides telephony, other strategic communication systems of a modern organization are also computer IT networks. Due to the services they provide for the exchange, acquisition, processing, and storage of gigantic amounts of data, the expenditures on elements used for their construction are usually much higher than for internal telephony systems, including investments in cabling systems necessary to ensure connections between computer network devices. A way to reduce investments in telephony and computer network systems is the convergence of services that these systems provide separately within a single ICT system. Convergence takes on additional significance for organizations with a multi-branch structure. In such a case, a computer wide area network (WAN), connecting the organization’s branches, can also be used for voice communication between users in different branches. This enables additional savings on telephone call charges.
The article comes from the magazine “e-Fakty” 2/2005.