Centrex

Centrex is a portmanteau of central exchange, a kind of telephone exchange.

In the United Kingdom, British Telecom markets this service as FeatureLine (although refers to it internally as Centrex).

Use of Centrex

Centrex is a PBX-like service providing switching at the central office instead of at the customer's premises. Typically, the telephone company owns and manages all the communications equipment and software necessary to implement the Centrex service and then sells various services to the customer.

No switching equipment resides on the customer's premises, as the service is supplied and managed directly from the phone company's exchange site, with lines being delivered to the premises either as individual lines over traditional copper pairs or by multiplexing a number of lines over a single fiber optic or copper link. In effect, Centrex provides an emulation of a hardware PBX, by using special software programming at the central office, which can be customized to meet a particular customer's needs. As with a PBX, stations inside the group can call each other with 3, 4 or 5 digits, depending on how large the group, instead of an entire telephone number (unit number).

Centrex (police training agency)

Centrex, the common name of the Central Police Training and Development Authority (CPTDA), was established under Part 4 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, and was the primary means of police training in England and Wales. It was based at Bramshill House, formerly known as the Police Staff College, Bramshill. Centrex had the responsibility for many aspects of police training and development. There had been a move away from running Police Training Centres to running police trainee/initial probationer courses in-house under the auspices of Centrex. Centrex was replaced by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) on 1 April 2007.

Centrex was responsible for overseeing the design and delivery of probationer training, investigators training and other key areas. Centrex was also responsible for evaluating police training to see if it actually works. Centrex also set the national police promotion exams, probationer development tests and advised on the assessment of recruits.