3 Dec
2007
3 Dec
'07
2:05 p.m.
Hi Bill, > I'm looking at FreeSwitch as a platform for an area where we're > expanding our business. I was wondering if I could get your guidance > on whether it's the Right Tool for what I need. I realize this is > potentially a Troll, and I apologize, but this seems so far to be a > small, positive group and I thought I'd just come out and ask. > > First some background. I have several clients who want various > value-added phone services. Basically, they want IVR systems with > some bells and whistles such as recording calls, integration with > their websites, and "follow me" services. My company has done similar > work for clients on the GIS (mapping) side, and I have personally > worked with Asterisk as a true smart PBX solution, so we are > considering adding this to our offerings. A few bits of feedback from our use of FreeSWITCH so far, which has covered: - a calling card product - a call recording product - a "pay for this web service using a premium rate call" product - a conference calling thing We've done our development in Perl, using the socket/event interface. At the time we started, there was no support for sockets in FreeSWITCH's Javascript implementation (there's a module now) - with Perl, we got all of CPAN. Which is great. We have had a certain amount of pain (and we're not completely through with it yet) - the Perl event handlers, built on the supplied FreeSWITCH::Client.pm module, occasionally turn up their toes in a way which Perl's docs suggest they shouldn't and I don't know why yet. Sound quality - in a SIP-only environment, no TDM - is excellent. We're using G.711 for the calling card, and the call profile (average duration, etc.) is unchanged from the same service on TDM, which implies the same quality. Lastly, I did a bit of work to add some custom tone/grunt detection to FreeSWITCH (which I *will* contribute back once I'm happy with it) and it, whilst not being trivial, was as straightforward as could be. I had been rapidly losing my hair trying to dig through the Asterisk source to work out where and how to add the same functionality, and FreeSWITCH's is utterly different. Really finally, the support from the FreeSWITCH community has been first class for me. I'd idly speculate that this is because most people who participate write code - it's currently the sort of project where it's maybe a bit impenetrable if you don't - and you're unlikely to be asked to buy a Digium card to sort out a software issue..! --Dave -- David Knell, Director, 3C Limited T: 020 8114 8901 F: 020 8692 0677 M: 07773 800623 http://www.3c.co.uk