If your Melbourne business is still running on a traditional PBX phone system — physical handsets cabled to a box in the comms cupboard — you’re paying more than you need to and your phones probably can’t do half of what your staff want them to. Microsoft Teams Phone is the cloud-based phone replacement that most Melbourne SMEs are now using. The migration takes about 60 days when scoped properly.
This post is for the office manager or IT-responsible person at a Melbourne business thinking about retiring the old PBX. We’ll cover what Teams Phone is, what the migration looks like in practice, what it costs, and when not to do it.
What Teams Phone actually is
Teams Phone turns Microsoft Teams into your business phone system. Each staff member gets a phone number. They make and receive calls through the Teams app on their laptop or mobile, or through a Teams-compatible desk phone if they want one. Calls can ring multiple devices simultaneously, transfer, hold, conference. Auto-attendants, hunt groups, call queues, voicemail-to-email all work the same way they did on the old PBX — usually better.
Teams Phone replaces the PBX. It doesn’t replace the phone numbers. You can port your existing numbers across; users keep their direct dial numbers; the main number, the toll-free number, the after-hours line all migrate.
Why Melbourne businesses are migrating in 2026
Three drivers, in roughly the order we hear them:
1. PBX hardware is at end-of-life. The Avaya, NEC, Mitel, or Cisco hardware in the comms cupboard was bought between 2014 and 2018. The vendor has been making “you should plan to upgrade” noises for two years. The replacement quote is $25,000-$60,000 for a like-for-like PBX. Teams Phone is cheaper to set up and significantly cheaper to run.
2. Hybrid and remote work has broken the office-phone paradigm. Half your staff work from home some days. The desk phone in the office only rings to a desk that’s empty Tuesdays and Thursdays. Calls go to voicemail, customers feel ignored, sales get missed. Teams Phone follows the user wherever they are.
3. The PBX has features nobody uses. Most PBXes were sold with elaborate feature sets — call recording, call accounting, music on hold, complex routing — that the business uses 10% of. Teams Phone covers the 10% that’s actually used, plus the integration with Teams chat, Teams meetings, Outlook calendar that the PBX never had.
Days 1-15: Discovery and design
The first two weeks aren’t about installing anything. They’re about understanding what the current phone system actually does — which is usually different from what the business thinks it does.
We map every number on the system: direct dials for staff, main numbers, after-hours numbers, fax numbers (yes, still), test numbers, that one number nobody’s sure what it does but everyone’s afraid to remove. We document every routing rule: who answers the main number first, what happens at lunch, what the after-hours pathway looks like, where IVRs branch.
Then we design the Teams Phone configuration: who gets a number, what the auto-attendants say, what the call queues look like, who can transfer to whom. We also confirm licensing: Teams Phone is an add-on to M365, currently around $13-$15 AUD per user per month for the basic plan, more for international calling bundles.
Days 16-30: Build and test
The middle two weeks are configuration in a parallel environment. We provision Teams Phone licenses for everyone, configure the auto-attendants, set up the call queues, test the routing. Users do nothing different — the existing PBX is still serving live calls.
This is also when we coordinate with the carrier. Number porting (moving the existing numbers to Microsoft) takes 5-15 business days for most carriers. We submit the port requests in week three for completion in week four or five. Direct routing or Operator Connect? We choose based on the existing carrier relationship and what’s more cost-effective for the business.
Days 31-45: Pilot and rollout
A pilot group — usually 10-15% of staff including someone from the leadership team and someone from reception — moves to Teams Phone first. Their numbers are already ported. They use Teams for calls for a fortnight and report back. We tune the configuration based on what they find.
Then everyone else moves in two waves over the following week. Reception goes last because their setup is the most complex (multiple lines, transfer relationships, the auto-attendant integration).
Days 46-60: Cutover, decommission, and tuning
Final port windows complete. The old PBX is taken offline (sometimes there’s a quiet 7-day overlap so anyone with the old DDI on a business card or Google profile gets a few days’ transition — but the system isn’t actually answering calls).
The PBX hardware is decommissioned. The comms-cupboard cables are tidied. The maintenance contract with the PBX vendor is cancelled. The handsets are recycled or repurposed (Teams-compatible models can keep running; older models go to e-waste).
The final two weeks are tuning. The auto-attendant prompts get edited based on real customer feedback. The hunt group ordering gets tweaked. The voicemail greetings get re-recorded. By day 60, the system is running cleanly and the staff barely remember the old PBX.
What it costs, in Melbourne, 2026
For a 30-user Melbourne business currently running a traditional PBX:
- Migration project: $8,000-$18,000 fixed-fee depending on complexity (number of auto-attendants, call queues, integrations)
- Teams Phone licensing: $13-$23 per user per month for domestic, more for international calling bundles, included in Microsoft 365 E5
- Carrier costs: typically $20-$40 per number per month (mostly the same as your current PSTN line cost)
- Hardware (optional): Teams-compatible desk phones if anyone wants them, $200-$400 each. Most users don’t need them — Teams on the laptop and mobile is enough.
Total monthly cost for a 30-user business: typically $1,200-$1,900 per month all-in. Compare to traditional PBX maintenance ($800-$1,500) plus PSTN lines ($600-$1,200) plus inevitable hardware refresh — and Teams Phone is usually 30-40% cheaper running cost.
When not to migrate
Teams Phone isn’t the right answer for everyone:
- Contact centres with 50+ agents handling high call volumes. Teams Phone’s call queue and reporting capabilities are improving but a dedicated contact centre platform (Five9, Genesys, NICE) still beats it.
- Highly bespoke IVR or call routing. If you’ve got 200 routing rules and a custom CRM integration that picks up call routing from a database, that’s a different conversation.
- Patchy internet at the office. Teams Phone needs reliable internet. If your office is on flaky NBN with no failover, fix that before the phone migration.
For most Melbourne SMEs of 5-200 staff with general office work, Teams Phone is the right answer.
Reference points
Our Microsoft 365 support Melbourne service covers Teams Phone administration as part of the ongoing M365 support fee. The business phone systems page covers the broader phone-system options if Teams Phone isn’t right for your specific case.
What to do next
If your PBX is on borrowed time, get the discovery scoping done now — before the maintenance contract renews and you’re locked into another year. The discovery alone tells you whether Teams Phone is right for you, and if it is, the project pays for itself within about 12 months on running costs.
Book a 60-day cutover plan — we’ll walk through your current PBX in 90 minutes and send a written migration plan and quote within a week.
