Hi everyone, 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. We have a SIP-based VOIP provider in the colocation site we use that has attractive pricing and we have good direct connectivity to them, so we would like to this to be a SIP-only solution (no TDM hardware, etc.). As we started looking at doing this with Asterisk, we found a few things. First, there are some real issues getting clear calls through Asterisk when there is no TDM hardware in place. This seems to be due to some timing issues, and seems to be worsened by some RTC changes on Linux 2.6.x. I wasn't surprised that there were some issues, but we have had a very hard time getting it to run well on a clean distro such as CentOS without custom kernel compiles, etc. Perhaps most concerning, we aren't seeing the kind of community support we found (and came to rely on) in the open-source GIS space. Posts to the asterisk-users board get lost on the way to the list, and when they do make it through, they get responses like "buy a Digium card just for timing". Well, in our 1U servers with only a PCI-Express slot, that's going to be a trick. So, I quite literally went to Google and searched for "Asterisk alternative" and FreeSwitch came up all over the place. I installed it on our server and had it running in about an hour with only minimal pain. And the sound quality (so far) has been very good when just playing recorded sounds. Here's my concerns about it so far - let me know if they're unfounded. 1) It seems to be reliant on a huge collection of external tools. I'm ok with running the FreeSwitch recommended versions of all of them, but isn't going to be a bit fragile as these tools mature separately? 2) It seems young (as a project, not the folks on it). Things like this post to the homepage worry me: http://www.freeswitch.org/node/103 as it looks a bit cavalier. 3) It seems to have more options and less guidance that I expected. This may be a first-impression thing, but there are many ways to do everything (Dial Plan, Integration languages, etc.). That's sometimes good (Perl took that approach for years) and sometimes awful (the competing opinions get in the way). We can contribute back to this project, both with development/debugging/etc. time and with documentation help, and right now it *feels* like the right choice. However, I thought I'd ask for some help getting past the concerns above before we jumped in. Thanks in advance for your time, Bill Binko bill.binko@mapshine.com