AVAD Technologies, a New York based company, is offering ‘hosted’ IP PBX services for businesses.

Hosted IP PBXs mean that the customer has no need to purchase and install potentially costly servers and associated hardware to run their IP PBX. The IP PBX is instead hosted by the service provider (in this case AVAD) who colocate the neccesary hardware, data connectivity and telephone lines in a data center.

An advantage of this approach is that teleworkers can communicate with the PBX at potentially higher data rates than one located behind a normal ADSL or Cable link. Further, having the PBX hosted at a major data center may improve performance features such a latency and throughput for large, distributed organisations.

Montrealwatch notes that recent research suggests that 44% of telephony users in Quebec, Canada are now using IP telephony rather than POTS.

This is up from 16% from 2006 figures.

There are apparently a large number of IP telephony providers available in Quebec.