[Freeswitch-users] FreeSwitch the Right Tool?

[Bill Binko]

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 at mapshine.com
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