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Asterisk vs. Freeswitch

I've got several different services I use for SIP connectivity: a BusinessVoIP account from Voxeo, another SIP provider account for making bulk outbound calls, and I'm about to sign up with a SIP service provider to transfer my phone away from AT&T to a company I can trust.

And I'd like to use Prophecy with all these providers, but that's simply not possible right now. I can't have them all up simultaneously. The easiest way around that would be to use a PBX such as Asterisk or a softswitch such as Freeswitch, but I don't have any experience with the latter and don't know if either one will integrate with Voxeo.

If anyone would care to post a How-To, discuss their experiences, or give me a few URLs to look at, I'd be obliged. We can open a chapter in the How-To book if there's enough data, or we can open a Forum topic if there's enough controversy.

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Asterisk>Prophecy integration

I've got exactly this scenario setup with asterisk. Multiple providers outbound and inbound, with 16 DID's from 3 different providers. Prophecy hangs off of asterisk as an extension, and can route to/from as needed. I've moved all the IVR functionality off of asterisk and onto the voxeo side, so I no longer deal with sphynx and/or flite. This makes doing things like interactive appointment scheduling much more fluid for the user. I also use this platform for reminder calls, balance inquiries, and payment processing, with more functionality to come. I've tested freeswitch as well, and it's just not as mature as asterisk, and although I think their approach will be better in the long run, it wasn't stable enough for my needs at this point. The asterisk setup and integration with voxeo was rather straightforward, and works with the base asterisk install, as well as with the trixbox .iso image.

Missed this first time around

I missed your comment, but caught it just now when I was reviewing the site.

Thanks for the comments about Asterisk, Trixbox, and Freeswitch. I'm about to convert some spare machines into a PBX and a Prophecy server, for production uses, and it's good to know what works and what doesn't work.

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Moshe Yudkowsky * Administrator