What is FreeSwitch?

In the world of communication via the Internet, it is important to know all the possible options, and FreeSwitch, although not a well-known one, is among them. This article has been written with the intention to give you a brief explanation on what it is and how you can make it work.

It is an open-source communications platform, which supports several operating systems with a modular architecture and just a few necessary funcions in its core. Optional modules and various funcionalities can be added to it, if you wish. It is a scalable softswitch library, which can function as either a softphone, a PBX (or Private Branch eXchange, which connects the calls to the desired extension, such as mobile phones, VoIP phones or computers), a switching engine, a media gateway, a voice-routing engine or a media server (Figure 1).

setup freeswitch with ozeki phone system
Figure 1 - Setup FreeSwitch with Ozeki Phone System

How to set it up:

  1. Download the stable version, or use the Subversion repository to install the latest version.
  2. Although there are a few pre-compiled binaries, compiling from a source is a better choice.
  3. Unpack and install the source.
  4. Get sound the sound files.
  5. The installation is a long process, so it is advised to chain the commands together with the operator.
  6. Once the long installation process is finished, you will have a basic FreeSwitch.

How to Use it

  1. Enter freeswitch into Terminal.
  2. Use fs_cli to reach the command line of a FreeSwitch server.
  3. You might see messages that look like error messages in the beginning, but do not worry about them yet.
  4. You need to know certain basic commands in order to use it.

    • version: it displays the current version.
    • status: it gives you statictical information, like number of active sessions.
    • help: as the name suggests, it gives you some help.

  5. When you would like to exit, type either … or fsctl shutdown.

Is there anything with less complicated usage?

Yes, there is. Ozeki Phone System practically gives you the same as FreeSwitch does, but Ozeki Phone System does not need so much time for the installation process, there is no need to learn commands, since it has an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface.

There are no modules to be installed separately to get additional features, but Ozeki Phone System has all of them included in the basic installation. It also offers you more than you could imagine, since its main goal is to satisfy all communicational needs of its customers.

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