A private branch exchange (PBX) is a telephone exchange that serves a particular business or office, as opposed to one that a common carrier or telephone company operates for many businesses or for the general public. PBXs are also referred to as:
- PABX – private automatic branch exchange
- EPABX – electronic private automatic branch exchange
PBXs make connections among the internal telephones of a private organization — usually a business — and also connect them to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) via trunk lines. Because they incorporate telephones, fax machines, modems, and more, the general term “extension” is used to refer to any end point on the branch.
PBXs are differentiated from “key systems” in that users of key systems manually select their own outgoing lines, while PBXs select the outgoing line automatically. Hybrid systems combine features of both.
Initially, the primary advantage of PBXs was cost savings on internal phone calls: handling the circuit switching locally reduced charges for local phone service. As PBXs gained popularity, they started offering services that were not available in the operator network, such as hunt groups, call forwarding, and extension dialing. In the 1960s a simulated PBX known as Centrex provided similar features from the central telephone exchange.
