A phone system comprises multiple telephones used in an interconnected fashion that allows for advanced telephony features such as call handling and transferring, conference calling, call metering and accounting, private and shared voice message boxes, and so on. A telephone system can range from just a few telephones in a home or small business up to a complex private branch exchange (PBX) system used by mid-sized and large businesses

PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange, which is a private telephone network used within a company or organization. The users of the PBX phone system can communicate internally (within their company) and externally (with the outside world), using different communication channels like Voice over IP, ISDN or analog. A PBX also allows you to have more phones than physical phone lines (PTSN) and allows free calls between users. Additionally, it provides features like transfer calls, voicemail, call recording, interactive voice menus (IVRs) and call queues.

Traditional PBXs would have their own proprietary phones, such that there would be a way to re-use these phones with a different system. This means that we either have system-lock-in (we are bound to the same system because changing system means also changing phones, which makes it prohibitively expensive to break away) or vendor-lock-in (we are bound to the same vendor because the phones are only usable with systems from the same vendor, sometimes only within a particular range of systems).