NoPBX, the South African-developed cloud PBX-over-GSM solution, has seen significant growth in new customers and other metrics in the past year. The company believes this is because its unique technology, which provides PBX services over GSM voice, “just works”.

NoPBX recently made the news when it expanded its services internationally and commenced operations in Namibia.

The solution was launched in South Africa at the end of 2020 and has found particular favour since then among small and medium-sized businesses. NoPBX now boasts clients across all industries, from agriculture and technology to hospitality, events, medical and legal.

The uniquely simple NoPBX platform allows any business to set up their own business switchboard and be active in minutes, including choosing their own telephone numbers, and requiring just their existing cellphones to work. In fact, the name “NoPBX” is a play on the fact that with a NoPBX system, you need none of the usual items needed for a phone system: no technical assistance, no physical phone lines or telephones, no hardware, no battery backup, no technicians, and importantly, no contracts.

NoPBX is fundamentally different to existing hosted business phone solutions because it runs entirely on cellphones (instead of using “VoIP” or “SIP” phones). It uses GSM (or cellphone) voice calls to connect you to your destination. The rationale for using this technology is twofold: to provide exceptional call quality, even when you have a bad data signal, and to give a service that does not use airtime or data from the users’ Sim cards to carry its calls.

Zero complexity

“NoPBX has done away with all the complexities and most of the costs of owning a business telephone system,” says Anton Potgieter, MD of Trabel, the developer of NoPBX. “Moreover, it makes corporate-level telecoms accessible to companies of any size, from a single user to tens or even hundreds of employees.

“New customer growth continues to be very encouraging, but an even better metric is that the average size of our customers, measured by number of users (or extensions) per site, is also climbing. We attribute this to the fact that, even though we are relatively new on the block, our customers are happy with our service quality and are showing this by increasing levels of trust in us.”

NoPBX customers are able to “start small” by connecting just a handful of users to test, and can then bring the full organisation on board once they are happy with the features and call quality. Additional peace of mind is there are no contracts involved, so downscaling or stopping the service can also be done instantly and without any cost.

NoPBX was built by Trabel from the ground up as it is brand-new technology, and it is a living “work in progress” – new features and enhancements are being added and rolled out constantly. Because NoPBX is a cloud-hosted service, all customers automatically get access to and benefit from these new features as they happen.

“We are very happy with our launch trajectory so far. We started from nothing and now have a solid base of satisfied annuity customers, and we are adding to this every day,” says Potgieter. “More importantly, our technology has been validated by the exceptional quality of our phone calls, and issues in this regard are almost nonexistent – the system really does ‘just work’. We are really looking forward to building NoPBX into a significant player to be reckoned with in the hosted telecoms sector.”

About Trabel and NoPBX
Trabel a South African technology development company founded in 2019, based in Cape Town and operational throughout South Africa. NoPBX is a cloud-hosted business switchboard system that runs over GSM, with Android and iOS smartphone connectivity. More information can be found at www.nopbx.co.za.