Stop yelling, use a mini PABX

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