[Freeswitch-users] In the spirit of ClueCon: Our FreeSWITCH Story

Tue Aug 4 17:56:27 PDT 2009

Maybe you can link your testimonial or put it here also? :D

http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Testimonials

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Diego Viola <diego.viola at gmail.com> wrote:

> Very cool, and yes, FreeSWITCH does rock =D
>
> Both the software and the community ;)
>
> 2009/8/4 João Mesquita <jmesquita at gmail.com>
>
> If this is good for me to hear, I would imagine to the core team.
>>
>> Despite of this not being a group support meeting, I have to say that:
>> Thank you for sharing, Seven.
>>
>> jmesquita
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 4:17 AM, Seven Du <dujinfang at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  Hello All -   In the spirit of ClueCon (which we are missing this year,
>>> but hopefully not next), we wanted to document our "FreeSWITCH Story".
>>>  We've posted it to the wiki(
>>> http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FreeSWITCH_Testimonial_on_Idapted.com)
>>> and it is copied below.
>>>
>>> Thank you all and enjoy a good conference!
>>>
>>> Seven Du (seven)
>>> Jonathan Palley (jpalley_idapted)
>>> Idapted Ltd.
>>>
>>>
>>> *How FreeSWITCH has created hundreds of job opportunities and changed
>>> lives. *
>>>
>>> We want to share our experience working with FreeSWITCH.  FreeSWITCH has
>>> been a key enabler of our business.  We hope this story can be a small way
>>> to say a very big THANK YOU ALL.
>>>
>>> "Changing lives" is an over-used cliche, but in this case, FreeSWITCH has
>>> really allowed us to do just that.
>>>
>>> What We Do:
>>> We are not a telephony business; we are an educational technology and
>>> service business. In Asia (China, in our case) students must pass English
>>> examinations to study or work abroad and gain new experiences.  However,
>>> there is limited access to native English speakers and the access students
>>> can gain is typically very expensive.  At the same time, in the U.S., there
>>> are many professionals looking for work-at-home opportunities - people who
>>> need jobs and would create great teachers.  Through our technology and
>>> content we empower these people to be effective English teachers.  Does it
>>> work?  Yes.  The majority of our students are getting test scores that many
>>> failed for years to get.  Just hours ago one student called one of our sales
>>> agents crying with joy.  And for our teachers, they are now working in an
>>> industry that was previously unavailable to those living in the U.S.
>>> http://www.idapted.com
>>>
>>> Why FreeSWITCH Enables This:
>>> FreeSWITCH has been a key enabler of our business.  Recording calls,
>>> controlling routing, integrating with various web-based interfaces, enabling
>>> multiple endpoints - these are all key features of what we must do.  Most
>>> importantly, setting up various servers and routes to mitigate cross-Pacific
>>> and country-specific network challenges is key.  Doing what we are doing
>>> with commercial solutions would have made the business unworkable.
>>>
>>> Our Experiences with FreeSWITCH:
>>> We started using FreeSWITCH as our VoIP Platform in April 2008, after
>>> receiving unsatisfactory results with other open source solutions.  It took
>>> one day of reading through the FreeSWITCH source code to know, "this is it.
>>>  This is the VoIP platform we build our business on".  It took a few days of
>>> working with the extremely competent and focused community to re-affirm this
>>> commitment.
>>>
>>> Our Setup:
>>> Our teachers use a custom software that integrates a VoIP client with our
>>> web based platform. Students connect to our teachers "on-demand".  Simply
>>> put, on a web-based comet interface the student enters a phone number (or a
>>> skype name or a gtalk account) and our platform bridges the best available
>>> trainer and the student.  At the same time a web-based interface is being
>>> updated.
>>>
>>> The challenge for us is the connection between teachers and students over
>>> a cross-continent network. For example, we experienced problems earlier this
>>> year when a Asis-Pacific communication fiber broken... So, we've learned to
>>> setup multi servers in multiple datacenters for redundancy.
>>>
>>> We run multi instances of FreeSWITCH so we can always use the cutting
>>> edge and mitigate the effects of bugs. A main, "stable" FreeSWITCH(FS)
>>> instance connect to other FreeSWITCHes - Fs-skype only loads mod_skypiax and
>>> FS-gtalk only loads mod_dingaling. Here is one beauty of FS: We just had to
>>> create different conf dirs (/usr/local/freeswitch, /usr/local/skype,
>>> /usr/local/gtalk etc). This allows us to run the same code base over
>>> different configurations, and call skype and gtalk accounts just like a
>>> normal PSTN gateway (sofia/gateway/pstn/.... or sofia/gateway/skype/.... or
>>> sofia/gateway/gtalk/.... ). More important, if one FS (say FS-skype) behaves
>>> abnormally or crashes, we can easily change to another FS-skype server (we
>>> run other servers located in various places in China and HK for
>>> redundancy).
>>>
>>> FS --|
>>>      |---PSTN gateways
>>>      |--- FS-skype
>>>      |--- FS-gtalk
>>>      |--- FS-skype2
>>>      |--- more ...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> COMMUNITY:
>>>
>>> The community's commitment cannot be undervalued.  The insightful,
>>> modular design of FreeSWITCH allows anyone to contribute, whereever their
>>> skills lie.  It also allows us to easily make modifications to the
>>> underlying code to suit our specific use-cases  We want to highlight a few
>>> key people and modules in the FS ecosystem:
>>>
>>> mod_sofia: SIP is how we connect to our PSTN gateways and to our teachers
>>> clients.  PSTN is zero-conf for the user and mitigates troubles with the end
>>> users network/microphone, etc (which is significant with our user base).
>>>  However, cheap providers fail randomly and FreeSWITCH's ability to control
>>> routing, use multiple endpoints all while clearly seeing what is going on is
>>> key.
>>> Most importantly, anthm and the core team have been super helpful in
>>> getting SIP to work with us.  Back in the pre 1.0 days anthm made
>>> significant changes to mod-sofia to enable clients behind nats without STUN.
>>>  Its important to point out that he didn't just make the changes -he forced
>>> us to really make a compelling case as to why the changes were important for
>>> FreeSWITCH.  This is a good thing.
>>>
>>> skype (mod_skypiax): Due to the facts that users prefer skype, we
>>> configured skypiax. It was unstable at the beginning and that's one of the
>>> reason we started running that separate FS instance.  To be fair, it has
>>> caused a lot of trouble - but we know this, its new software that takes a
>>> big risk and implements a complex hack.  What is important is that the
>>> author of skypiax(Giovanni Maruzzelli) has been a huge help. He's been very
>>> active fixing bugs and logging in to our box to help trouble shoot. We owe
>>> him a *big* thanks.
>>>
>>> To make Skypiax more useful, we also created some patches including the
>>> ANY and RR interfaces for sequential and round robin line hunting, some bug
>>> fixes and other features like continue-load-on-fail and auto-skype-user
>>> which haven't been merged into trunk yet. Thanks a community that gives us a
>>> platform where we can all benefit and contribute.
>>>
>>> erlang (mod_erlang_events): Another key enabler of the next release of
>>> our system is the erlang interface.  We have a complex realtime queue
>>> routing system has it handles input not just from freeswitch, but numerous
>>> other web interfaces and sockets.  Erlang was the perfect technology to
>>> implement this in and luckily an Erlang module for FreeSWITCH was already
>>> written. Beautiful.
>>>
>>> THE MORAL OF THE STORY:
>>> FreeSWITCH is a great piece of software that has enabled new technologies
>>> and business models.  The design has allowed (and the core team has
>>> nurtured) a vibrant and exciting community that has made the software even
>>> better.  Every day we go to work excited to push the boundaries of what can
>>> be done with telephony technology and are confident this is the platform of
>>> the future.
>>>
>>> Thank you all.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>>
>>> Du Jinfang (Seven) - Technical Operations/VoIP Manager
>>> Jonathan Palley - CTO
>>> Idapted Ltd.
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
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>
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