Analysis of the use of FreeSWITCH  in IP telephony networks

In the article an overview of the main functions of the software switch FreeSWITCH. The comparative characteristic with the nearest Asterisk conundrum is given. The advantages and disadvantages of using FreeSWITCH in IP telephony networks are analyzed. FreeSWITCH is an open telephony platform that is distributed in source code, created to meet the need for voice or text-driven systems that can be scaled from softphone to softswitch. When developing the FreeSWITCH architecture, the authors took into account all the problems of existing open source software for IP telephony. IP-PBX FreeSWITCH has a wide variety of functionalities that make this product popular in the telecommunications market. Since FreeSWITCH is an open source application that runs under different operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, Solaris and Linux on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms), this allows you to build new and modify existing services. To organize a complete set of PBX functionality, there is no need for large hardware costs, since the software that forms the basis of the IP-PBX FreeSWITCH server is free, just like the OS on which it is based. FreeSWITCH allows you to use C, C ++, Spidermonkey (ECMAScript), Lua, Python, Perl, Java, .Net platform for writing applications. If the numbering capabilities of the XML numbering plan are not enough, you can easily implement any logic; in this case, the restrictions are imposed by the selected programming language. A feature of FreeSWITCH is the use of Nokia's SIP sofia-sip stack, which is considered to be the best implementation of the SIP protocol distributed in the source code. SIP is the main work protocol, FreeSWITCH, although PCI card drivers for integration with traditional telephony are also supported, as well as other IP telephony protocols. FreeSWITCH also supports many of the IP PBX functions, such as call transfer, interception, call parking, call recording, listening, and others. The architectural solutions embodied in FreeSWITCH primarily make it possible to consider it not only as a replacement for the “traditional” office PBX, but as a high-performance platform with a wide scope of application. FreeSWITCH is used either as a primary or as an additional service platform. A successful example of the second use case can be considered as the beloved system sipXecs. FreeSWITCH has also been used successfully in high-end mass dialing platforms (Newfies dialer, ICTDialer), tested by millions of outgoing calls. FreeSWITCH supports narrowband and wideband codecs, making it the perfect bridge to old devices for the future.