AstriCon 2008 â€“ A chat with FreeSWITCH, PIKA

PHOENIX, Ariz. - FreeSWITCH doesn't really compete with Asterisk, but complements it, says a spokesperson. Meanwhile, PIKA Technologies appliance has secured over 75 developers including one or two familiar names.

Brian West, in charge of quality assurance, public relations and administration of the FreeSWITCH project, said that many people are using Asterisk and FreeSWITCH in a complementary fashion. While some are replacing Asterisk with FreeSWITCH, many deployments are happening in a side-by-side fashion - sometimes in the same box. FreeSWITCH supports software-based conferencing, so people can load both programs on a single server and use FreeSWITCH to provide conferencing to Asterisk without any additional hardware.

FreeSWITCH also provides native support for 16 and 32 kHz wideband audio; Asterisk currently supports 16 kHz audio.

West says that FreeSWITCH does appear to be displacing another open source telephony packages. A number of OpenSER users are switching over to FreeSWITCH for various reasons.

Over at the PIKA Technologies booth, Vice President Terry Atwood said the company's appliance - announced at last year's AstriCon - has 75 developers working with it. "About half of the developers are running Asterisk on it and the other half are porting their own [Linux-based] telephony applications on it," said Atwood.

Among the companies working with the appliance are Fonality and Intuitive Voice Technology. The latter company has already ported its application over to the low-form factor PowerPC-based device, while Fonality is in the process of moving over its code base - including its newly announced HUD 3.0 software - to the device. Atwood said moving from a PC-based solution to a lower-cost embedded processor design with a paltry 256MB of flash storage was a challenge for some companies since they had to squeeze code down into a smaller space and then recompile applications for the embedded PowerPC environment.