The popular open-source IP PBX has a "great deal of locking contention and race conditions." Those conditions only become more obvious to users will when they try doing lots of 'creative' things such as having lots of call going into a queue," he says. Call centers and centralized switches are the prime markets for those sorts of issues
Minessale says FreeSwitch won't be bounded by those same problems. The software is designed to run on a cluster of an unlimited number of servers though realistically that will be gated by the capacity of the network. Early tests on a single server showed 500 simultaneous calls on a Pentium 4 server running at 2.8 GHz. The server completed 30 calls per second with bursts to 100 calls per second.
Comparisons against an Asterisk server are still difficult to make given that FreeSwitch doesn't account for the performance impact incurred through transcoding. With a PowerEdge 2850 with SIP or IAX enabled, an Asterisk server could handle up to 75 or 100 calls per second, Fleming says. However, West claims to crash an Asterisk server under similar testing conditions to the ones used on FreeSwitch at 30 or 40 calls per second.
The big difference, though, will be in the multiserver support. FreeSwitch is designed allow multiple servers to be clustered so they function as a single device. The event system and state information could be synchronized in a cluster of FreeSwitches, says West.
Digium looked at clustering Asterisk servers, but efforts were stopped because telephone calls entailed too many state transitions for the clustering object platform from Service Availability Forum to keep up, Fleming says. FreeSwitch uses the clustering capabilities contained in SofaSwitch, code written by Minessale, which is in theory should hold a cluster of FreeSwitches.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
