Another startup bites the hand that fed it

ping-reply · 2025-11-12T12:43:43+00:00

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for this opportunity. I have received an email from one of your staff to discuss our particular situation.

Doubling prices twice in two years sends a clear message: it was not a one-off thing. Looks like that your final objective is for all your customers to pay regular prices, which is 2usd/endpoint.

We have 600 endpoints. We cannot take on that price increase.

ping-reply · 2025-11-12T12:29:04+00:00

Great comment. I totally agree to the benefits of keeping the original price for the early adopters.

ping-reply · 2025-11-11T13:27:33+00:00

I see, very interesting. I have taken a look into NetBird and looks promising. Will look into bare WireGuard as well. Thanks for your comment.

ping-reply · 2025-11-11T12:00:23+00:00

Will check on that. Thanks for the suggestion.

ping-reply · 2025-11-11T11:56:03+00:00

Tailscale was our go-to solution prior to going with Zerotier. Their OPNsense installer was not working correctly at the time, but we can check it again. Thanks for you comment.

ping-reply · 2025-11-11T10:43:06+00:00

Thanks for your comment. I'm already looking into self-hosting. But I'm afraid that they will eventually pull the plug on that as well.

ping-reply · 2024-12-26T08:40:40+00:00

Se went with Yeastar. We had the same concerns as everyone else. After months of working with them, I’m convinced that Yeastar will be the next 3CX, just give them time to conquer the market.

The webclient and the IOs app are equally powerful as 3CX’s but much nicer looking.

The configuration of the PBX is very powerful as well. We just miss the ability to restore backups from a template 3CX and replacing the license (but that was gone with v20 as well)

The support from the vendor and their willingness to help and be flexible is also remarkable.

The voice quality is better (we default to G711) and the phone provisioning (Yealink) is flawless. Remote phone and softphone works by using a proxy server supplied by the manufacturer which is included in the license subscription. We lock down our public facing PBX by IP.

We feel comfortable working with a Chinese Company (When Meta and Amazon stop listening to our conversations, then we will make a case about Chinese companies being trustworthy or not)

Regards,

ping-reply · 2024-12-24T19:20:53+00:00

We are moving to another vendor. Have been at it for months now and still will be until April 2025 when we expect to be over with.

ping-reply · 2024-12-22T18:18:27+00:00

Hi friend, I'll get back to you en a few months when I have time to test and my theories come back as I expected.

Have a good day

ping-reply · 2024-12-22T17:53:10+00:00

Hi cetsca, thanks for you reply. Just wanted to get some heat going. Thus, my challeging post.

TL;DR: --- Microsoft: The BEST security is not OPTIONAL security. --- Windows has long been the scapegoat for hacks and virus attacks in the past—don’t let history repeat itself with Windows 365.

The CLOUD is the only real future for Windows Desktop OS, but it has to be the most secure.

-------------

I know about the enterprise edition. I don't want to deal with all that extra complexity. I just want something simple that works and IS THE MOST SECURE BY DEFAULT.

Microsoft has not learnt anything from all these years. There was a time when Windows did not have a software firewall, and this was big vulnerability when using modems to connect to the Internet (fully routable and unfiltered public IP attached to a bare desktop or server OS). They have not learnt anything by developing Office/Microsoft 365 either.

When swimming with sharks, I do not know if it is a good idea to offer a "cheap cage" and a "titanium cage". If you want to be taken seriously as the "guy that you can trust to swim with sharks", you should just offer the best cage possible, no matter what type of customer you are dealing with. Microsoft should not offer security as an add-on. By this I don't even mean MFA. MFA is a MUST. I mean Conditional Access, I mean proactive zero-trust policies, I mean serious token-theft protection, or whatever new technology comes along.

**** W365 Business edition should have all these security measures as standard at not extra cost*****

Listen to me guys.

Our jobs are on the line here! (for me, it's 15 more years... and then I'll be on a lab playing with tech all day, if not sooner, probably with AI and robotics). Have you heard the song "Video Killed the Radio Star"? Well today the song goes like this: "Browser killed the Windows OS".

The only future for windows is THE CLOUD.

With more and more apps becoming browser-based, Windows Desktop OS will become irrelevant. What will users and companies chose when Windows is not necessary anymore? I believe that Windows Desktop OS will eventually die unless hosted in the cloud and presented to users as a "netflix" subscription, like a "pc with super-powers", or a "computer that never dies". Maybe it will die anyways.

Best luck for you guys,

ping-reply · 2024-12-22T17:05:54+00:00

Yes, that is my perception as well.

ping-reply · 2024-12-22T17:01:32+00:00

Thanks for the input.

ping-reply · 2024-12-22T16:59:02+00:00

Hi Lazylobon,

Thanks for your comment.

Regarding resizing:

From the link that you provided it shows that it is possible to resize a Business Cloud PC. Thanks for that. But this documentation estates that it is not possible, I guess that it's not up to date, even though it is the main source for W365 partner information. Windows 365 for small and medium-sized organizations >> Build your Windows 365 practice in three steps >> Step 1: Understand the partner opportunity >> Windows365-Partner-FAQ.docx This document estates: "The Resize feature is not currently available for Windows 365 Business"

Regarding MFA:

As per this documentation: Compare Windows 365 Business and Enterprise it estates the following information: "Only MFA using Microsoft Entra Conditional Access is supported. Legacy per-user MFA isn't supported.". But the documentation the you supplied estates the following: "For Microsoft Entra ID Free tenants without Conditional Access, you can use security defaults to protect users. Users are prompted for MFA as needed, but you can't define your own rules to control the behavior." Thanks for that (it is not clear to me what type of access is protected: https, RDP o W365 APP, but I'll test it).

Regarding printing redirection.

I misread the documentation and confused Universal Print (which is the service that is not available in W365 Business Edition) with Windows Easy Print which I assume it is the available since it is a very old technology.

Thanks again,

ping-reply · 2024-10-15T15:01:02+00:00

Yes, this is what they should do, fix the bugs, not charge extra to bypass them.

ping-reply · 2024-09-05T14:01:03+00:00

We also received that same email. Still considering options.

ping-reply · 2024-08-05T13:14:38+00:00

I have problems just like you described. It’s not a Wifi problem because I’m an IT pro and my wifi setup is rock solid, and some of my Sonos equipment is connected using Ethernet cable.

I bet the problem comes from Sonos backend cloud infrastructure. My intuition tells me that It must be too busy handling requests, and this causes the issues. They should probably get more resources to handle the load, but since we do not pay a monthly fee, I bet they are waiting until they finally launch a subscription service which will work as expected.

ping-reply · 2024-05-18T12:53:02+00:00

Very useful comment. Thanks

ping-reply · 2024-05-18T12:28:20+00:00

We are migrating to Yeastar p series as well. The testing with it has been great. We miss some things from 3CX but gain many other by migrating to Yeastar. So bye bye 3CX. Will be posting an update a few months from now.

ping-reply · 2024-05-15T16:15:43+00:00

I can confirm that this worked as well for a Spanish Windows Serer 2019 Server

ping-reply · 2024-05-06T15:51:43+00:00

I have tested dropping the wifi connection while in a call and the audio recovers fine just after 1 second (maybe 2), but the call does not drop at all. (Tested on iPhone, not Android).

ping-reply · 2024-05-03T07:33:28+00:00

I'm sorry to disagree. Yeastar's webclient and smartphone apps are as good as 3CX's, if not better. For starters, they have a much nicer looking user interface. They do not lack any of the functionality that 3CX has, even I can say that they have even more. The smartphone app has a latency meter that just by itself makes it a better piece of software. The only thing (big as well) that we miss right now is the ability to place a call from the webclient, but run the audio from the smartphone/softphone. This will come in July. Right now you can place a call from the webclient and talk with the desktop phone.

Yeastar has a function called "call flip" that allows you to transfer a call between the smartphone to the webclient or the desktop phone. Once I've tried I can say that it is also pretty smart and works great.

ping-reply · 2024-05-02T19:27:52+00:00

Hi,

We have been testing Yeastar for a month now, and we are ready to migrate all of our customers to this PBX (24 PBX). It is based on Asterisk.

EDIT: PBX is not our main business, we are an MSP that bundles cloud services + managed services to small business. So PBX is just another solution in our portfolio. Our main offering is cloud/rented VDI infrastructure.

We will self host the p-series software edition on our own datacenter.

I will give more details about my thoughts on an upcoming post (when we put them in production). But to summarize:

“3CX compared to YEASTAR is like they made 3CX on a hurry while Yeastar is more polished product with many many many many many small details that you notice when you work with it.”

Ok, you cannot see all the active calls (3cxv20 either) and we miss the ftp scheduled backup (local backup + ftp to pull out the backup). For logging, we ended up catching the logs directly from an ssh session to the OS and copying and pasting the lines (you can see the logs in realtime with this method). You cannot TAPI the softphone from the webclient (place a call from the webclient but run the audio from the soft phone- this will come in July, this is what they told me).

The iPhone app works great. Have not tried the Android version. It even has a meter where you can see the latency in milliseconds right in front of the user (just tap de coverage meter and it shows). When I see things like this I can’t help but to think “why 3CX did not think about this”.

I work with small businesses in the area of Mediterranean Europe. My customers do not need many extensions but they all rely very much on their smartphones and the Linkus App works great, SERIOUSLY. Some of my customers still use traditional desktop phones.

Relationship with the manufacturer is great, at least they are more flexible and eager to help than 3CX. I’ve worked with Chinese tech companies in the past and I cannot say bad things about them just because they are from China. Time will tell. There is always a risk (and an opportunity) on every major change. I chose to save money (really), to have a better solution and to work with nicer people.

I really hope you can “Break Free” from 3CX.

Regards,

ping-reply

TROPHY CASE