Santa Barbara-based Impulse Advanced Communications is moving into new headquarters and landing big clients in the Tri-Counties and beyond. And much of the growth is coming from sending phone calls over the Internet.

VoIP — that’s “voice over internet protocol” — has been around since the mid-1990s, when broadband became commonplace in business. A special handset connects to the Internet rather than a phone line, and the whole system is managed with computers and networking equipment rather than a phone-based private branch exchange, or PBX — that mysterious monster that hid in the closets of businesses for decades.

Impulse has made big gains by investing in a networking back-end for Internet phones. Customers have to buy Internet-phone handsets, but once they’ve made that switch, the phones can be maintained and managed the same way as computers. In other words, you can just pay the computer people, instead of the computer people and the phone people.

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