The FacetPhone architecture is designed to provide a cost effective, highly scalable and reliable business communications system. It replaces the customer's existing PBX phone system. FacetPhone consists of software running on a standard computer server and IP telephony gateways which convert analog voice to IP data and vice versa. The system is managed through a graphical interface, either on a PC or a Linux / UNIX workstation. The FacetPhone system uses only industry standard components and protocols. Click here to see an architectural image of FacetPhone.

Server

The FacetPhone server software runs on the reliable, scalable, robust and cost effective Linux operating system.

IP Telephony

The server manages the IP phones and telephone gateways, which are designed to be external to the server cabinet. This allows for much greater scalability than conventional architectures. Other PBXs have configuration limitations dictated among other things by how many cards will fit into the server chassis. FacetPhone has no such limitation. External gateways mean higher reliability as the server does not need to be shut down when replacing or adding gateways. With an external gateway architecture, the process of adding or removing extensions and/or PSTN lines is also greatly simplified.
FacetPhone supports gateways located remotely from the server. Combining this remote FacetPhone support with a QoS Virtual Private Network (VPN) allows for the complete transparent integration of branch offices and home workers via the Internet.

Network Switch

The media gateways are connected to the network via a switch (rather than a hub) to eliminate any potential issues with network latency or throughput.

Telephone Instruments

Polycom^® IP phones and all standard analog telephones are compatible with FacetPhone.

The end result of the above architectural approach is a cost effective IP-based telephone system with outstanding reliability and scalability characteristics. Other PBX systems have fixed limits on things such as number of extensions, number of trunks, disk space available for voice mail, etc. By combining industry standard computer hardware with external gateways, and the robust, reliable and scalable Linux operating system, the FacetPhone system does not have any significant limitations as to how large it can be configured, whether that be extension counts or voice mail messages. Larger configurations, or existing customer expansions, will typically just involve adding more telephones and gateways.