Cloud Telephony Review
Aug 28, 2020
Question: What
is your review of Cloud Telephony?
Answer: For
someone who’s worked with various telephony solutions, cloud
telephony (also known as UCaaS ) was one tech advancement that
really intrigued me.
At a high level, cloud
telephony enables an organization to leverage telephony
applications through the scale of the cloud.
The requirement to maintain
this complex equipment and related PSTN infrastructure is shifted
to the cloud provider.
That alone should cause someone
to dance if you’ve ever dealt with a Telco provider!
With this in mind, I wondered
what the real difference was between various cloud
providers.
Decision to review
cloud telephony providers
There’s several cloud telephony
solutions in the market. From small startups, medium size private
businesses and large publicly traded companies.
In 2017, my goal was to start
reviewing the most popular cloud telephony solutions and share my
findings.
I even started a website called
ThaPhoneGuy (don’t go to it know since the page is broken) which
was intended to list this information.
One initial issue I ran into
was realizing providers required annual contracts.
Sometimes multi
year.
Well there goes my idea of
reviewing several cloud providers :(
But I continued on narrowing my
choices down to RingCentral and 8x8.
Since 8x8 allowed me to sign a
1 year contract, I went with them as my first cloud telephony
provider.
Thoughts after nearly 3 years
As you can see from this
section, I stayed on longer with 8x8 than originally
planned.
There was a point when I did
seriously consider switching.
Early on into my evaluation, I
ran into call quality problems. Issues with calls dropping or
having delayed voice during active conversations.
8x8 found no issues in their
network and that lead to me looking further into my setup
locally.
Eventually I found the problem
with my router.
Once it was replaced, that
cleared all calling issues.
This short video explains this
problem further. If you’re experiencing similar trouble with your
cloud setup, then you’ll want to pay close attention to
this.
Some other observations with
cloud telephony:
-
New features and software improvements are a regular occurrence. There’s no action on your part as a subscriber. This differs from legacy telephony platforms where the end customer would have to upgrade hardware and / or set aside a maintenance window update software.
-
There’s a larger emphasis on collaboration tools in this environment. While telephony was the primary feature set, video, chat and application integration is also an important part of the story.
-
User licenses play a bigger role in billing and must be managed properly by a business. It could be too easy to forget about what’s in use and potentially pay for services that may not be needed.
-
Internet connectivity becomes an important factor since cloud telephony platforms uses this to deliver service. You’ll want to ensure this is stable for the best experience.
-
Desktop and mobile apps make it easy to work from anywhere.
Overall I’m very pleased with
my cloud telephony setup.
The features continue to get
better without me having to do anything to receive the
benefits.
Organizations that are still on
the fence about making the change should understand they’re missing
out on productivity gains by hanging onto a legacy telephony
platform.
The cloud has won in
telephony.
Now is the time to take
advantage of this new technology.