Company switchboards, or PABXs, have not evolved much over the past two decades since corporate voice-over-data (VoIP) calling was introduced into the mainstream.

Sure, these now offer gazillions of fancy digital features, but sadly the call quality is still very hit and miss … and this erodes exponentially when your users are out the office and using “mobile” and “work from home” connections.

This is an increasingly prevalent problem in the “new normal”, as more and more employees need or want to work remotely, and smaller, agile, remote businesses spring into life from the ashes of lockdown.

But during the chaos of 2020, a completely new PABX technology has quietly emerged that offers seamless and perfect call connections over your existing cellphones, with the functionality of a full office PABX thrown into the deal.

The technology is NoPBX‘s “PBX-over-GSM” — and it was invented right here in South Africa! It marries the best of both worlds — GSM call quality and cloud-hosted PBX functionality — into a new way of providing business calls that simply works perfectly, anywhere that you have a decent cellphone signal.

Call quality

Here are the main reasons NoPBX will be a solid choice as your small business switchboard:

Call quality: When your calls are made over GSM, like NoPBX does, the call quality is pretty much always perfect. This is because in the background the GSM networks are doing the “heavy lifting” of placing and managing your calls. And our South African GSM networks are the veritable “four-hundred-pound gorillas” in our telecommunications space — they have been built over decades with no expense spared, to provide the best possible call quality, full stop.
Call quality: One of the biggest drawbacks of a VoIP PBX is that your call quality depends very much on the quality of your data connection to your phone. On a properly managed Wi-Fi link connected to fibre Internet, you are golden. But when out and about, your phone can unexpectedly roam all the way down to an edge data signal, which m e #@ , ke n .s. .. . yu .. ca ..n’t… he..r.. m..e. You get the picture… But with a GSM PBX, your calls are crystal clear on the cellphone voice network, no matter where you are or how dodgy your data signal.
Call quality: Did we mention the importance of call quality? At the end of the day, that is the single most important feature your PBX needs to deliver. Everything else is irrelevant if your calls sound bad. And with a NoPBX GSM PBX, you have perfect peace of mind that you can make a business call that does not embarrass your business, every time, without fail.

There are of course lots of other benefits to a NoPBX: It is incredibly fast and easy to set up, the reporting is online and in real time, the NoPBX app runs on both Android and iOS, you get perfect separation of personal and business calls when using the NoPBX app, business hours and company voicemail are built in, NoPBX is network-agnostic (which means it works across all cellphone networks), and so on.

Look ma, no wires!

And then there are of course the magnificent “nos” to NoPBX … there are no wires, no cabling, no physical phone lines, no on-premises equipment, no installations, no maintenance, no additional handsets/devices needed (you can use your existing smartphones), no bottlenecks (from sharing a few lines between many users — because each NoPBX user gets their own line), no contracts, no charges to employee’s Sim cards, no need for additional Sim cards, and many more.

Trabel, the creators of NoPBX, make several bold claims about NoPBX: that it is the simplest cloud-hosted PBX in South Africa, the easiest to set up, the quickest to set up, the easiest to manage, the lowest total cost of ownership, and the only true PBX-over-GSM.

NoPBX is indeed a bold step out of line in an industry that has become staid and underwhelming.

For more information, or to trial your own NoPBX solution today, visit www.nopbx.co.za. Dealer enquiries are also welcome!

About Trabel
Trabel (Pty) Ltd is a South African technology development company founded in 2019, based primarily in Cape Town and operational throughout South Africa. NoPBX is a fully hosted PBX-over-GSM, with Android and iOS connectivity. More information can be found at www.trabel.co.za and www.nopbx.co.za.