You don’t need a separate texting app to reach customers by SMS. If your phone system is ICTPBX, the messaging lives right inside it. Enterprise Edition gives you a threaded inbox for back-and-forth texting and a campaign tool for reaching a whole list, both sent over SignalWire and billed next to your call minutes.
Why keep SMS inside your PBX
Texting has a way of scattering. Someone uses their personal phone, someone else buys a standalone app, and a month later nobody can find the conversation a customer swears they had. Folding SMS into the PBX pulls that back together.
Because ICTPBX sends over SignalWire, the same vendor already carrying your SIP trunks, there’s no second provider to sign up with and no extra bill to chase. Every message, typed in the inbox or fired off by a campaign, lands in one shared history. And texting inherits the tenant and user model the rest of your system already uses, so a number stays with the team that owns it.
The Messaging Inbox
The inbox looks like any chat app you’ve used. Conversations run down the left, the open thread sits in the middle, and you type at the bottom. Each thread shows the other party’s number, a snippet of the last message, and a little arrow telling you which way it went. Messages carry a status too, moving from Queued to Sent to Delivered as SignalWire reports back.
Starting a conversation is quick: click New Message, drop in the number in full international form like +12015550123, type, and send. Anything that person sends back shows up in the same thread, and the inbox checks for new messages about every 15 seconds, so inbound texts appear without a reload.
Bulk campaigns
When one message needs to go to a whole group, the Send SMS campaign tool handles it. You write a reusable template, choose the contact group, then set a retry count and a delay between sends so a big blast stays inside carrier rate limits. Each person gets their own message, and every one of them is logged in the same history as your one-to-one texts.
What it costs
Outbound SMS is metered the same way fax pages are, under the standard Option-A model. Each package includes a monthly free quota, and you only spend credit on messages past that quota. Received messages don’t cost anything. Tenants can keep an eye on usage from the Billing Quota page, right alongside voice minutes and fax pages.
One thing to sort out before you send in the US
American carriers require A2P 10DLC registration, both a brand and a campaign, before long-code SMS will actually deliver. Until that clears, carriers can quietly filter your texts even while ICTPBX marks them Sent. It catches people out, so it’s worth saying plainly: this is a carrier requirement on your account, not a setting you flipped wrong in the portal.
Two-way SMS is an Enterprise Edition feature. For the step-by-step version with screenshots, read the SMS and Messaging guide, and you’ll find the rest of the feature set on the support center.
Frequently asked questions
Can I receive texts, or only send them?
Both. SMS here is two-way, and inbound texts to a number your tenant owns show up in the matching thread within about 15 seconds.
What format do recipient numbers use?
E.164, the full international format with a plus sign and country code, such as +12015550123.
Do campaign messages and inbox messages share a history?
Yes. They both write to one unified record, so a campaign send and a one-to-one reply sit side by side.
Is two-way SMS in Community Edition?
No. It’s Enterprise Edition only and won’t appear in a Community build.