This interesting blog post came across the wire today. It's from a tech professional who needed a scalable solution to handle thousands of inbound and outbound calls with IVR capabilities. Those of us who have taken on challenges like his can appreciate the magnitude of the project and how difficult it can be to implement a viable solution. It sure sounds like he's happy with the solution he built around FreeSWITCH.
 

This press release from Sangoma just came in today. Sangoma has been a great supporter of the FreeSWITCH project and they are now doing even more! Sangoma is supporting the new TDM abstraction layer, FreeTDM, that will be replacing OpenZAP. More details will be forthcoming.
 
The FreeSWITCH team would like to thank all those corporations, organizations, and individuals who support the FreeSWITCH project.
 
-Michael

I thought this was a nice article over at Tech Crunch. (For those who don't know, TC does lots of articles on web startups and cool new technology stuff.) It discusses a cool project called PBWorks (formerly PBwiki) that uses FreeSWITCH to power the voice component. Check it out!
 
-Michael

We frequently get questions about billing solutions for FreeSWITCH. I've personally not had the opportunity to use it, but I've certainly heard of ASTPP. Evidently the ASTPP project has had FreeSWITCH support for some time. Here is a somewhat detailed guide to installing ASTPP on a CentOS system posted on the ASTPP site. We would love to hear some freedback from our users. If ASTPP is a viable option for VoIP billing on a FreeSWITCH server then we'd like to be able to recommend it where appropriate.
 
-Michael

The folks over at TMCnet.com have a new blog post up that features some information about FreeSWITCH, CudaTel, and a few quotes from Anthony. It's a nice read. The author has a bit of confusion over the relationship between FreeSWITCH and Barracuda so we'll just mention here that FreeSWITCH is not a "subsidiary" of CudaTel or Barracuda Networks. (The author says that "FreeSWITCH" is a "company" that is a "subsidiary" but, of course, FreeSWITCH is simply a project, not a "company.")
 
Regardless, this is a nice indication the OSS telephony is indeed gaining momentum and that FreeSWITCH is garnering some serious attention from the telecom industry.
 

For those of you who may not know, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has an endeavor called the Patent Busting Project. The goal is to get the USPTO (Patent and Trademark Office) to review bogus patents that do nothing more than stifle innovation and encourage patent trolls to sue legitimate businesses. The EFF has scored another victory, and this one affects many of us in the VoIP and telephony industries. Please check out this news release from the EFF. It's definitely good news for OSS telephony.
 

Here's an interesting article over at Fierce VoIP: Within 3 years VoIP will have a 79% penetration rate in businesses. I'm assuming this is worldwide but the article doesn't say specificially. In any case, it's another good sign that FreeSWITCH (along with VoIP technologies, be they OSS or proprietary) will be used a lot in the coming months and years.
 
-Michael

We are pleased to announce that the FreeSWITCH development team is going to meet in one place for the release of version 1.0.5. The official release will take place the week of February 8, 2010! To celebrate we invite and encourage the community to buy the development team dinner one night that week. To donate, simply click the PayPal button on the right side-bar of this page.
 
On behalf of the FreeSWITCH development team: thank you for supporting the project and thank you in advance for giving the guys a well-deserved dinner.
 
-Michael

All those interested in learning more about VoIP and SIP should head over to Ars Technica and read An Introduction to the SIP Protocol, Part 1. It is a slightly technical introduction to how SIP works and is a good foundation for those who need to understand more about how SIP works with the rest of the network. I will post links to any followup articles that Ars puts up.
 
-Michael

We'd like to extend our thanks to Sangoma, a Friend of FreeSWITCH, for continuing to support our favorite open source telephony project. There is a nice write-up over at TMCnet.com discussing Sangoma's future plans for support not only the FreeSWITCH project itself but also the FreeSWITCH community and the ClueCon open source telephony developer's conference.