Passionate Pioneer Part II: Anthony Minessale Talks FreeSWITCH
Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 1:10 pm by Sam Schneider

We’re back with more from the FreeSWITCH pioneer, Anthony Minessale. Let’s get right to it:

BandwidthU: What’s new or upcoming in FreeSWITCH that you’re most excited about?
Anthony: The 1.0.4 release of FreeSWITCH should be out this summer. It will feature advanced NAT support by using both NAT-PMP and UPnP to reverse-map it’s own UDP ports. 1.0.4 will also feature HD VoIP codecs including the Polycom SIREN codec and the open source CELT codec from the author of the popular SPEEX codec. Another big accomplishment in this release will be support for ZRTP the transparent auto-negotiating voice encryption protocol.

BandwidthU: That’s a lot of acronyms. Does Asterisk beat FreeSWITCH like a drum on anything?
Anthony: One area it has a for-sure advantage is in popularity. Asterisk was around 7 years before we started FreeSWITCH and they have enjoyed a hefty budget from their parent company to spend on advertising. Originally the FreeSWITCH team started out with me alone just playing around with code in my spare time. It took me the last 3 quarters of 2005 to get it from a good idea to something you could even run. Along came Mike Jerris and Brian West to help me carry that idea to a viable project in early 2006. We remain to this day the 3 core developers but we have gained a lot of help and contributions from our growing community and its awesome to see the stuff that they come up with. We are not quite as popular as Asterisk but we’re certainly trying to catch up.  This URL shows the trends on google for searches related to Asterisk PBX vs FreeSWITCH: Google Trends.

FreeSWITCH

BandwidthU: So you’re somewhat of an underdog. That being said, what are the main advantages of using FreeSWITCH?
Anthony: I try not to encourage anyone to use FreeSWITCH. I would rather they made that decision on their own but I can certainly say that FreeSWITCH is right for anyone who is looking for structured architecture and deep modularity and has a decent sense of humor (this is a requirement for telephony in general - not just for FreeSWITCH.)

BandwidthU: What popular PBXs/appliances run on FreeSWITCH that we might not know about?
Anthony: I have heard that OOMA uses FreeSWITCH on their appliances as well as PIKA. Recently Kristian Kielhofner has been working on FreeSWITCH and has it working with Astlinux see: http://blog.krisk.org/2009/02/more-onfreeswitch.html

BandwidthU: Let’s get practical. How does FreeSWITCH benefit the user? Does it make life easier? Add more features?
Anthony: Yes, FreeSWITCH has several great features, and we may not have even documented them all yet. We have many of them listed here: http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Specsheet Probably some of the biggest ones are the high definition audio allowing conferences and phone calls to operate at 8,16,32 and 48 khz. Also our support for TLS SIP and sRTP has proved popular with users. We have also had a lot of attention for our shared line appearance and busy lamp field features.

BandwidthU: What’s your sense of state the FreeSWITCH community as a whole? Is it vibrant? Is it sustainable and thriving?
Anthony: One way we judge our community is through our IRC channel, #freeswitch on irc.freenode.net . We have noticed a sharp increase of users in our chat room in the last year. We also have noticed a sharp increase of traffic on our mailing list http://lists.freeswitch.org . Our community is growing quite well and most of the users are very helpful and very nice.

BandwidthU: What would be the best thing that could happen to FreeSWITCH at this point in time?
Anthony: A whole bunch of developers showing up and wanting to help out managing the code!

We’ve got more questions for Anthony in Part III of the interview, coming later this week. Stay tuned! The final portion of the interview will cover ClueCon, the Open Source Telephony conference coming up in August.

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  • There was no attempt to be unfair with that link:

    note on

    http://www.google.com/trends?q=freeswitch%2C+asterisk

    none of the waypoints A B C D E F have anything to do with VoIP it's mostly about steroid abuse
    "don't be an asterisk" is a slogan for anti-steroid abuse.

    asterisk is such a generic term there is no way to compare searches without qualifying it.

    google knows what people search for and favor it to the top so if you or I search for asterisk
    we will get the telephony based results based on previous searches. That explains your top 10 theory.
  • Doug,

    Thanks for your comment! Statistics are tricky, and can be used for good or for evil...

    Either way, I believe Anthony's point is that FreeSWITCH is rising in popularity and buzz, which I think you might grant, even if the keywords he selected aren't perfectly suited to the argument.
  • Other interesting terms to compare freeswitch against are: digium, trixbox, freepbx, elastix
  • That google trends link is quite misleading. It compares "freeswitch" searches to "asterisk pbx" searches, going on the assumption that the majority of asterisk searches are types as "asterisk pbx". I just googled asterisk, and 9 of the first 10 results were asterisk pbx sites. That being the case, it is safe to assume that a comparison of "freeswitch" vs. "asterisk" would be just a fair comparison.

    And doing a google trends query using those two terms "freeswitch" and "asterisk" yields tremendously different results.

    Just try: http://www.google.com/trends?q=freeswitch%2C+asterisk

    I'm not against FreeSwitch. It is my understanding that it just may be the next big thing, and put major pressure on Digium & others who have businesses built on asterisk.

    However, even if your product is better, I think that you should play fair. And the above link is very misleading in my opinion.

    -
    Doug Mortensen
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