I was having a discussion with a colleague recently about PBX setups, and it got me thinking about how much things have changed in the VoIP space over the last few years.
Back then, most companies I worked with were perfectly fine using a typical cloud PBX provider. You sign up, configure extensions, connect a SIP trunk, and you're basically ready to go. For small teams it still works well.
But once organizations start growing, the cracks begin to show.
One problem that comes up pretty often is routing flexibility. Another one is integration. If the company wants deeper integration with internal tools or wants to experiment with more complex call flows, those packaged PBX systems can feel a bit restrictive.
Because of that, I’ve started seeing more engineering teams experiment with custom hosted PBX solutions instead of relying completely on managed platforms.
In practice, the architecture usually isn’t that complicated conceptually, but it does require more engineering effort.
A setup I saw recently looked something like this:
• OpenSIPS handling SIP routing and registration
• Asterisk managing the dial plans and PBX logic
• A couple of SIP trunk providers for redundancy
• WebRTC support so calls can also happen inside browser apps
• Infrastructure running on cloud VMs so scaling is easier when traffic grows
The main advantage is control. Teams can design their own routing logic, integrate with internal services, and adjust the infrastructure when call volumes increase.
Of course the downside is that you now have to manage everything yourself — monitoring, failover strategies, security, scaling, all of that.
Still, it seems like more companies are exploring custom hosted PBX solutions when they need flexibility that typical cloud PBX platforms don’t provide.
Curious what others here are running in production these days.
Are you sticking with managed PBX platforms, or building your own setups with tools like Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, OpenSIPS, or Kamailio?
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