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 9. Hardware

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:

  • FXO and PRI/T1 gateways to connect our phone system to PSTN lines

  • FXS gateways to connect an analog device as an extension to our phone system

  • SIP handsets as an extension to the 3CX Phone System

  • Firewall configuration

Gateways: The connection to the outside world

Gateways are devices that convert various...