Stop yelling, use a mini PABX

It is a common scene in a typical Jakarta home. The phone rings, someone picks it up and then, with the full force of his or her voice, calls the name of the family member whom the caller wishes to talk to. Now imagine if that person is a teenager and she is upstairs in her bedroom listening to some music that is blasting from her boombox speakers. Not many people will be willing to serve as a voluntary phone operators for long, understandably.

You can buy an additional phone device, put it in the teenager's room, pull a long cable downstairs and connect it to the terminal box of TELKOM's drop line. If there is more than one teenager in the house, just buy more phone cables and more phone devices.

This, however, will only provide a partial solution. Oftentimes, when the phone rings, three or four people may pick it up at the same time, creating some confusion to the caller.

And, then again, what if the teenager is asleep and fails to pick up her phone? You will still have to shout or go upstairs and knock on her door to wake her up. Yes, there is another less than elegant solution to this problem: Install an intercom in your house, and put a terminal in the living room next to the main phone that everybody uses. But that would mean installing more cables and adding more hassles.

In corporate offices today people use Private Automatic Branch Exchange, or a PABX. It is an electronic switch that automatically routes an incoming call to the desk of the intended recipient. However, in most cases, using a standard PABX for the home is overkill. Luckily, thanks to the electronic industries in Korea, Taiwan and China, more and more mini PABXes are available on the market, and they perfectly meet the needs of a family - as well as your SOHOs (Small Office Home Offices).

Costing between Rp 700,000 and Rp 1,400,000, these PABXes are easy to install. Some models can accept two TELKOM lines, while the more basic ones can only accept one external phone line. More expensive models, such as the Gigaset 4000 series from Siemens, is wireless. They do not need a cable, and you can take the cordless handset anywhere in the house - even into the bathroom. Siemens claims that its Gigaset cordless handset has a range of 50 meters inside the house and 200 meters outdoors.

If you have a mini PABX, people can call your number and then enter the number of the extension of the person they wish to speak to. No operator will be required. If they do not know the extension number, they can wait until someone in the family picks up the ringing phone and then transfer their call to the right person. Of course, a mini PABX can also function as an intercom.

A good Mini PABX also lets you make a conference call with an external party and a second extension. You can also set the device so that it will not ring when the incoming call is intended for a particular extension. It must have the facility to record your greeting message, such as "If you want to talk to June, press 3".

You should also be able to deactivate the greeting message when needed, and reactivate it later without losing the recording. Most mini PABXes allow you to record up to 8 seconds of message, though, so you really have to speak fast.

Some mini PABXes also enables you to lock any of the extensions so that no outgoing call can be made by them. Or, you can tell it to reject 0 as the first digit, for example, so that the extension cannot make a long distance, an international call or a call to a mobile phone.

If the level of teenage disobedience has become so high that your rule of limiting the length of chit-chatting on the phone no longer has any effect, you can set the extension timer to automatically cut the call after 12 minutes, for example.

If your house is like a harem, you can add more mini PABXes to ensure that each room has a phone connection. This makes mini PABX a good choice for a growing SOHO.

And, finally, if you need to put a caller on hold, a good mini PABX should also be able to provide some entertainment by playing music. Of course, you cannot expect CD-quality music over the phone, but some music is generally better than just complete silence. -- Zatni Arbi