By Amanda Ciccatelli, TMCnet Web Editor

Phone (News - Alert).com’s recent blog about virtual office news features Stuart Zipper, a contributing editor to Communications Technology and a high tech business journalism consultant and freelancer who discusses how business VoIP is overtaking PBX (News - Alert).

VOIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol, has become a popular telephone option for homes and businesses now with the availability of broadband internet connections for a virtual office. In the past PBX has been the main resource for business communications requiring more complex types of telephone communications, but more recently, VOIP has begun to overtake the choice of PBX due to cost.

Most PBX offers many of the same advantages as VoIP and regular land based phone services such as call waiting, forwarding, caller ID, but the expense is higher. In the past PBX has been considered more stable, but with great advances in internet technology VoIP has become as stable as PBX. When individuals and businesses consider the differences VoIP vs. PBX, the extensive cost of PBX has kept small businesses and individuals from using them. Recently, PBX servers have worked to create smaller more affordable system, but VoIP still remains the most affordable solution for private and small business use.

Infonetics (News - Alert) recently released a report stating that while PBX sales in 2011 rose globally year-over-year by a reasonable total of six percent, around the end of last year the market turned to favor VoIP.

“Pure IP PBX systems and unified messaging were the sole segments of the enterprise VoIP and UC (unified communications) equipment market to post sequential growth in the fourth quarter,” Infonetics said.

According to Infonetics, tor the full year 2011, pure IP PBX line shipments grew strongest among all market segments, up 12 percent.

However, Zipper believes that these statistics don’t tell the entire story. The reported growth of traditional PBXes for the year is attributed almost entirely to Asia and Latin America. In the U.S. and EMEA small and medium businesses did not add employees and many continued to hold off on upgrades, according to Infonetics.

Zipper said that it doesn’t look as if the problem in the PBX business is the slow job growth rate the U.S. Instead, it is attributed to the fact that business VoIP services are growing. Large enterprises that need tens of thousands of phone lines are buying their own IP PBX hardware, but Infonetics isn’t publicly factoring in the loss of hardware sales to the burgeoning virtual PBX market, the one served by companies such as Phone.com (News - Alert) with its Enterprise VoIP phone service plan for the virtual office.