As those of you who read our newsletter already know, we've begun running FreeSWITCH on our production network. We're currently using it to power our conference bridge servers and we're very impressed with it.
Historically, Asterisk hasn't had a great track record for conference quality, due to its dependence on the ztdummy timer module. We had a fairly poor experience with it, specifically with the quality of the conference bridge degrading over time. Seeing that we had to do something about our conference bridge, we went and tested a few different things.
First we tested Asterisk with the app_conference module. We skipped right over the Meet Me conference module because it still relies on the ztdummy timer. We hear that it's been improved, but decided it was more worth our time to investigate software that approached the problem from a different direction, which app_conference does. We were pleased with app_conference and found that the quality was greatly improved over our previous experience with Asterisk, but it doesn't have a lot of the functionality that we were looking for in a professional grade conference bridge, such as join/leave sounds, music cues and background noise reduction. (For a full list of functionality, see this matrix.) But, being huge fans of open source development, we wanted to give FreeSWITCH a try, even though it is still in beta.
Since it is a beta project, getting it up and running had some challenges, but after we started working with it, we really liked it. The conference bridge has the functionality that app_conference lacked and it has some exciting features that we really liked. The ability to mute speakers on the fly is entertaining...but bridging two conference bridges together has even more serious appeal. We've also been recording some internal conferences, which is a handy feature. The problem with sound quality degrading over time that we saw in Asterisk 1.2 was no longer an issue.
(Editor's Note: The FreeSWITCH conference bridge has many features that we expect to add to our conference bridge product on an on-going basis. Please see our conference bridge marketing page for the official list of released features.)
We've been using FreeSWITCH happily for months now and suspect that it will be giving Asterisk serious competition in the near future. We're looking forward to the release of version 1.0, which is scheduled for next Monday, May 26th. And, of course, our PSTN Gateway service has been tested and approved by the FreeSWITCH community for interoperability. FreeSWITCH, we like you too!