Book Image

The 3CX IP PBX Tutorial

Book Image

The 3CX IP PBX Tutorial

Overview of this book

Traditional PBX systems have often been expensive and proprietary. With 3CX, you can now create an easy-to-use, complete, and cost-effective phone system on Microsoft Windows. This practical guide offers the insight that a reader needs to exploit the potential that 3CX has to offer.This practical hands-on book covers everything you need to know about designing, installing and customizing 3CX to create an all-inclusive phone system. It takes a real-world approach that walks you through all aspects of 3CX and its features. From installing the software, to backing things up, to understanding what hardware you need – this book covers it all.The 3CX IP PBX Tutorial will take you from knowing very little about VoIP to almost expert level with detailed how-tos on every aspect of 3CX. Starting with the basics, and covering the free version of 3CX as well as the more advanced features of the Enterprise version, you will learn it all.In other words, this book covers numerous topics such as installation and configuration of 3CX, choosing a VoIP Provider, integration of a trunk into 3CX, the commonly used 3CX hardware, and backing up your phone system.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
The 3CX IP PBX Tutorial
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface

Chapter 5. Trunks—Connecting to the Outside World

We now have a working phone system with extensions, voicemail, digital receptionists, call queues, and several other features. This is great! However, what if we want to call home or have a customer call us? For that, we need to connect 3CX outside our internal network. This connection is called a trunk. In this chapter, we will cover the following:

  • PSTN trunks

  • SIP trunks

  • Introduction to dial plans (full coverage is in Chapter 6, Configuration)

  • Hardware needed for analog lines

PSTN trunks

A Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) trunk is an old-fashioned analog Basic Rate Interface (BRI) ISDN or Primary Rate Interface (PRI) phone line. 3CX can use any of these with the correct analog to SIP gateway. Usually, these come into your home or business through a pair of copper lines. Depending on where you live, this may be the only means of connecting 3CX and communicating outside of your network.

One of the advantages of a PSTN line is reliability...