A phone system that has no way of interfacing with the real world is of little use. While you could have a software-based phone system server and softphone, even then you need a headset. The hardware part of the phone systems plays a large part in how users perceive how nicely the phone system works. In this chapter, we will be looking at several hardware components that help make the 3CX Phone System useful such as phone handsets and gateways. In my experience, gateways tend to be the most complicated and time consuming hardware device to set up on your phone system. We will offer some tips to help make that process easier.
Some of the things we'll look at in this chapter are: