When I needed to reprovision a phone at a remote job site, I learned the hard way that Sangoma is worse than any other manufacture in regard to planned obsoleteness.
I want to document what happened here because the community deserves a clear-eyed account, not the sanitized version Sangoma posted in the forum thread.
In early April 2026, admins started reporting that S-Series phones registered in the Sangoma Portal simply weren’t showing up in the Poll list — even after factory resets and fresh firmware installs. No announcement preceded this. No advisory was sent. Phones that had been provisioning reliably via rs.sangoma.net just… stopped. You found out when a phone failed to report in to the sangoma portal.
When a ticket was finally opened (Case #02139606), Sangoma support confirmed: “We are currently experiencing a redirection server issue that is affecting the provisioning of S series phones via the portal.” A redirection server “issue.” Not a deprecation. Not a planned change. An “issue” — which suggests they either didn’t plan this well, or chose not to communicate it honestly. Given what came next, I’m leaning toward the latter.
Then came the forum response, which deserves scrutiny. Rather than leading with an apology or a migration guide, the moderator’s first action was to edit the thread title to flag these as “EOL phones” and drop a link to the P325 as a direct replacement. The follow-up post confirmed that following “server security upgrades,” S-Series phones are permanently incompatible with the redirect server, and that no further firmware updates are planned.
Let’s call this what it is.
This is planned obsolescence with a thin coat of “security” paint on it.
Sangoma made a server-side change that they knew — or absolutely should have known — would brick the zero-touch provisioning workflow for an entire product line. They did it without warning. They did it without a migration path. And then, when customers raised the alarm, the first public-facing response was to rename the thread and point people toward buying new hardware. That’s not a support response. That’s a sales funnel dressed up as a forum post.
The S-Series went EOL in 2023. Fine — hardware ages out, that’s the reality of this industry. But EOL is supposed to mean “we won’t develop new features.” It is not supposed to mean “we reserve the right to remotely disable core functionality on hardware you purchased and deployed, at a time of our choosing, without telling you.” That’s a fundamentally different thing, and conflating the two is either dishonest or negligent. Possibly both.
What makes this worse is the years of manufacturer neglect that preceded it. The S-Series suffered from sluggish firmware update cycles, long-standing bugs that were quietly closed rather than fixed, and documentation that lagged badly behind real-world behavior. Admins on this forum have been papering over S-Series quirks for years with workarounds, community knowledge, and sheer stubbornness. The phones worked — not because Sangoma supported them well, but in spite of the support they received. And now, after all that, Sangoma’s parting gift is to yank the redirect service with no notice and suggest you spend more money.
There’s a word for a manufacturer that accelerates the death of its products in a way that just happens to benefit new hardware sales. It’s not a flattering word.
