Cloud PBX companies are a money grabbing scam. You will still have outages, you will still deal with people not knowing what they are doing. I have 20 Grandstream PBX systems throughout my customer base and combined with twilio elastic sip I’ve had ZERO outages in 2 fucking years. With our previous hosted PBX in the cloud, I won’t name the company but they are one of the biggest, I had 2 outages in the last year and it effected every customer. They work perfectly fine with yealink phones. For backups Have the grandstream ucm back itself up to your file server or some other box and off-site it. Users that need a remote phone, have them use VPN and the free app. Also if it’s super critical to have redundantcy buy 2 switches and set them up in HA.
Anyone with networking experience can configure the firewall for VoiP and also QoS. The systems are set and forget. Do a backup and update the firmware every so often. Like it’s barley an hour of work a month and sometimes 0 hours of work per month. Your company isn’t going to be asking for changes to the phone systems daily or even monthly. Most companies in the cloud are 10 to 15 dollars an extension plus minutes. What an absolute fucking scam.
I would agree with you on their older product’s but grandstreams GRP phones combined with a 6300 series PBXs have been like the easiest fucking thing in the world for me especially with their zero config. I have 20 that I manage and everything you’ve just said with the 6300 ecosystem has yet to happen to me. Their phones are kind of shitty compared to yealink but my largest system is paired with Yealinks with no issues. I just can’t say anything bad about the pbx yet. Its been 2 years now and I NEVER have to work on them except firmware updates. I haven’t even had a firmware update break anything yet.
Managing these PBX systems which maybe is conservatively 30 hours a year so far after they have been installed has easily saved me atleast 27k in yearly revenue and thats just because I’m not paying some asshole company in the cloud per extension anymore. Twilio does all the compliance so im not at threat of being shut down.
It does lack advanced features I will give that to you but most companies with 30 extensions aren’t asking for those advanced features. As long as they can listen to their voicemail and forward the phone to their cell when they leave they are happy.