How and Why We Chose FreeSWITCH

Before FreeSWITCH:

Since 2009 we are in wholesale voip business and a stable switch with strong billing is core need of wholesale business.

Initially the switch used was MVTS Pro with Billberry billing by Jerasoft on radius protocol.

It was a handsome investment on both but by the time traffic increased and as the CPS touched 50+, MVTS started to crash which gave huge loss as all connected calls went unbilled.

One way was increasing hardware and machines and more license fee to Mera (now switch ray ) which was much expensive so solution was to explore open source softwares .

We had little experience with asterisk in past so thought to give a try. After MVTS, I tried a2billing and that did not work for five minutes (literally!!!). There was nothing wrong with asterisk nor a2billing but our traffic load was heavier for them.
 

Then after a lot of research we found Yate performance is better than Asterisk. Yate radius client didn't have everything for our Radius Server so we paid 5000 Euro to Yate Developers for module customization and configuration.

Yate worked fine for sometime and as CPS went between 70-80 Yate started to crash and one month loss was more than USD 20+k due to unbilled calls. Though in our findings bottleneck was database and not the yate itself but db design was also from Yate so it was an experiment of about $25,000 and result was a big NO.

We were in position of nowhere as commercial solutions for such high loads were too much expensive that time. we had quotes of about $300,000 USD.

We already invested much on Jerasoft billing + Mvts and we were satisfied with Jerasoft performance so only needed was a stable switch with radius support.

Thanks to Google, there was one more switch named "FreeSWITCH".

 

With FreeSWITCH:

It took few days to understand how FreeSWITCH works with the help of mailing list ,  wiki and IRC Chat.

we put some postpaid clients traffic on FreeSWITCH and there were no issues .

Sounded promising so we asked FreeSWITCH developers for help and mod_xml_radius born and within 2 months we switched our whole traffic to single machine FreeSWITCH with jerasoft as billing on separate machine.

Our normal traffic was 5000 concurrent calls with cps as high as 100-150 in peak times . And it was most smooth experience ever. 

Maximum load we had was 7000 concurrent calls with cps of 200+ and off course we were not doing media proxy. 

Since then our whole team is in love with FreeSWITCH.
 

FSbilling: 

After using FreeSWITCH as switch we were free from all switching issues but due to increased traffic Radius server started to respond slowly and ultimately we had to upgrade our hardware . Back in 2014 we rented a R920 Server with 256GB of RAM Quad E7 CPU and Raid 10 with 10k rpm SAS and SSD drives.

So monthly expense of such server and jerasoft support  were much higher specially when we had a decline in traffic in early 2016.

So we decided to make our own billing for FreeSWITCH which we can run on single hosted server along with FreeSWITCH and save cost.

Fsbilling is in our production since Feb 2016 , though its in very early stages but for wholesale traffic its doing all stuff efficiently which we were used to do in Jerasoft billing.

As all this success was due to open source and softwares like FreeSWITCH we thought to share our billing with the community so if any one is in need like we were they could get benefit of it.

Please feel free to check Demo on www.fsbilling.com 

You can also download the billing and installation instructions from same site. 

Thanking you all

Ahmed