Phone Systems

A phone system describes the type of telephone network used in business or network switching environments. Loosely, a system is a grouping of phones or devices (extensions) made to share common lines. Typically a system provides features and functionality geared towards multi line environments and well beyond what is found on a analog (house type) single line telephone.

Types of Phone Systems
Independent Keysets
Though not a true telephone system, Independent Keysets are often miscatagorized as such. They are not classified as systems because they lack key features such as switching and centralized communication.
Independent Keyset describes an analog multiline phone which is able to communicate with other sets plugged into the same line(s) over a proprietary protocol. The network of phones provides rudimentary system like functionality.

Key Systems
Key telephone systems are systems geared towards small business. Though traditionally key systems lacked some of the functionality present in PBX systems the migration of many features from (more expensive) dedicated hardware to (less expensive) software has blurred this distinction. For systems manufactured in the last ten years the terms Key and PBX are often used interchangeably. Key generally refers to smaller sized systems and PBX denotes larger systems.

Private Branch Exchange
The largest class of telephone system is the private branch exchange - or PBX. PBX's are used in large office environments and easily scale to hundreds of users. PBX is used to describe larger and more feature rich systems.

Telephone System Manufacturers
Nortel
Nortel Networks produces telecommunications and networking equipment. For the last 20 years Nortel has been a very prominent player in the SMB phone system market - in the past with their Norstar Meridian line of products, and more recently with their Integrated Communication Systems line and Business Communications Manager VoIP equipment. One of the prominent features of Nortel's products is the ability to reuse equipment; Nortel phones like the T7316e can be used with a large range of cabinets including last generation Nortel 616's and Nortel 824's, more recent offerings such as the Nortel CICS, and even cutting edge VoIP cabinets such as the Nortel BCM 400.

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