VOIP Today magazine (www.voiptoday.org) is happy to carry on exclusive interview with Primary Author and Lead Developer for FreeSWITCH: Anthony Minessale.

VOIP Today magazine spoke with Anthony Minessale about Business, technology and products.

Voiptoday.org: What were the greatest achievements of FreeSWITCH during the past four years? and what is the next step?       

Anthony Minessale:  The first major achievement was that first working phone call!  I can imagine how Alexander Graham Bell must have felt the first time he heard another person’s voice over a telephone wire. I had done many years of Asterisk core development at that time but because it was my own code written from scratch it was special.   The next major achievement was the first time we were able to present FreeSWITCH at ClueCon [ http://www.cluecon.com ]  It was 8 months after we opened the project up to the public and we gave our first full-length presentation on the internals of the core.  Another memorable moment was early 2008 when we had our first 48khz VoIP call and full support for the broad range of wideband audio codecs supported.  I think right now will be looked back at as one of the greatest achievements of all.  We now support a wide range of audio formats including BroadVoice, Siren from polycom, CELT and many more.  We support IPv6 and TLS/sRTP/zRTP for secure communication.  We support a fully functional wide-band capable Skype endpoint and we have several companies using FreeSWITCH with several thousand calls at a time on a single server and best of all FreeSWITCH is the enging powering the new CudaTel phone system from Barracuda Networks [ http://www.cudatel.com ]  It’s truly been an exciting 4 years.

Voiptoday.org: What was the annual growth rate of FreeSWITCH since its beginning?

Anthony Minessale:   I don’t make much effort to keep track of this sort of statistic since we are just an open source project.  But there is one single metric I like to watch for the fun if it all and that is the number of people in our irc channel #freeswitch on irc.freenode.net.  When we started the project there were about 4 people in the channel.  Myself, the 2 other co-founders of the project Brian West and Mike Jerris and one other curious guy peering through the blinds.  After about 2 years of non-stop working on the code we had collected a respectable 60 or so visitors in the channel.  They were mostly early-adopters trying to get a jump on how FreeSWITCH worked.  This last year we have seen well over 200 people in the channel and the minimum tends to hover at about 160 during off-hours.

Voiptoday.org: What are the developments that are taking place now in the Enterprise Clients/sector in FreeSWITCH?        

Anthony Minessale:   Many of the users of FreeSWITCH are trying to use it to make some sort of product and as a matter of fact so are we.  As I mentioned earlier, we are developing a commercial PBX for Barracuda Networks [ http://www.cudatel.com ] that is powered by the standard release of FreeSWITCH using all of the standard methods for real-time control offered to our open source user base.  This is really rewarding as a developer to see that the designs I have put into the architecture can allow something as complex as the CudaTel to exist on its own and rely on FreeSWITCH as its telephony engine.

Voiptoday.org: What is the biggest implementation done by FreeSWITCH?

Anthony Minessale:  We have several ITSP using FreeSWITCH now and I really don’t know which one is biggest but after all of the years of agony we have all suffered looking for a stable platform to run a hosted telephony business on.  I am glad to see some of these company solving their immediate problems and having more time to focus on finer points of their businesses and giving back to the community.

Voiptoday.org: how can we use FreeSWITCH Module: Distributor for clustering and failover?

Anthony Minessale:  This module is a port of one of my hosted Asterisk modules from years ago.  The module essentially just allows you to define a list of words and a numeric weight for how many times each word should appear out of a certain total number of attempts.  For instance, if I have servers foo, bar and baz.  I can add them to a list and define that out of 10 requests it should return foo 6 times, bar 3 times and baz once.  Then I can render the string with that distribution scheme from my dial-plan to choose what server to send calls to.

Voiptoday.org: What are the new features that will be included in FreeSWITCH v1.2?

Anthony Minessale:  I have a policy in FreeSWITCH to not take advantage of version numbers to produce a false sense of achievement as some other products like kidz bop and AOL do.  For us, every new release is a major improvement.  We are currently at release 1.0.4 and soon to release 1.0.5 in the next few weeks.  This minor version change actually includes 6 months of non-stop work and will be our best release to date.  We do plan to branch our code tree at some point and begin work on a 1.2 version that will have much more drastic changes than the 1.0 branch because we feel we owe it to our users to leave them with a stable platform to run on while we work towards the future but I cannot promise we will begin work on this any time soon as only time will tell when the right time will come to make that move and anything can happen to change our plans between now and then.

Voiptoday.org: Do you think that FreeSWITCH support for open-sourced Broad voice audio codecs change IP phones industry?

Anthony Minessale: I think it’s a great move by BroadVoce to release the codec code as open source.  It will hopefully pave the way to more codecs being released for free use preventing the patent encumbered and proprietary codecs from slowing down the progress of digital telephony and VoIP in general.

Voiptoday.org: How do you predict the form of competition between FreeSWITCH and other competitors like CallWeaver and Yate?

Anthony Minessale: We don’t really view CallerWeaver, YATE, Asterisk, etc. as “competitors” in the strictest sense of the word. The opportunities for OSS telephony software are wide open – it’s not a proverbial zero-sum game where Asterisk has to “lose” in order for FreeSWITCH to “win.” In many cases people are using FreeSWITCH as a complement of their Asterisk/CallWeaver/YATE installations. However, we are also seeing a fair number of people displacing their existing systems with FreeSWITCH, be they Asterisk or the proprietary offerings from the likes of Cisco, Avaya, etc.

Voiptoday.org: what is the best GUI?

Anthony Minessale: Why CudaTel, of course! (Smile.) There are a few GUI applications in development by third parties. The FreePBX team is working on version 3 of their GUI application which will support both Asterisk and FreeSWITCH. Another interesting GUI project is FusionPBX (www.fusionpbx.com) which is designed to be a simple, light-weight GUI front-end to a standard FreeSWITCH installation.

Voiptoday.org: Do you think that we can have something similar to FreeSWITCHcon like Astricon event?

Anthony Minessale: We already do! ClueCon (www.cluecon.com) is an annual developer conference that brings together experts in the fields of VoIP and telecom. It is not a FreeSWITCH-only gather. This past August we had our 5th annual ClueCon conference and there were presentations on Asterisk, OpenSIPS, Wireshark, and other technologies. Videos of the presentations from ClueCon 2008 and 2009 are available at http://viddler.com/explore/cluecon.