Reasons to Migrate Your Asterisk Solution to FreeSWITCH Development

Asterisk telephony solutions have been in the industry for decades as it was the foundation technology used to build different types of VoIP based communication solutions. Earlier, there were no other options available in terms of technology to use as a base technology to build a SIP telephony solution. However, now, FreeSWITCH development is the most viable solution available to VoIP solution users. In fact, if you are thinking of upgrading your legacy Asterisk solution, then instead of upgrading to the higher version of Asterisk, you must upgrade your system to FreeSWITCH.

Similar to Asterisk, FreeSWITCH is also an open source platform, but it has several components and driving factors that make it the best choice in the 21st century to use a VoIP telephony or smart telephony platform for your own business or to run a business as one of the VoIP providers. To give you more insight into this subject matter, we will cover the following points in this blog post.

What is FreeSWITCH?
Why consider FreeSWITCH over Asterisk?
What is the process of migrating from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH?
How can we help you migrate from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH?
Concluding notes

So let’s delve deeper into each of the above mentioned points to understand the top reason to migrate your Asterisk software to FreeSWITCH.

Table of Contents

1.  What is FreeSWITCH?

Similar to Asterisk, FreeSWITCH is also a building block to develop different types of VoIP solutions. You can develop any communication system using Asterisk or FreeSWITCH. It is an open source telephony development solution, which can be used to build scalable, robust, secure, and feature rich communication solutions. It uses a modular architecture for VoIP software development, which is why it has several added advantages to offer as a development platform over Asterisk development. In addition to that, the system also has enterprise APIs, called SignalWire APIs to offer. These APIs can be integrated into a telephony solution to build more powerful solutions. You can also use professional SignalWire API integration services.

In a nutshell, for any type of proprietary or open source VoIP development project that needs real time transmission of voice, video, fax, data, and multimedia, you must invest in FreeSWITCH.

2.  Why consider FreeSWITCH over Asterisk?

If you are already using a VoIP solution that is built by an Asterisk custom development company, this is the time to migrate to the FreeSWITCH platform. There are several reasons to choose FreeSWITCH over Asterisk, let’s explore the major ones.

Major driving factors that standout in FreeSWITCH

The major USP of FreeSWITCH is for both voice and video, it uses a single communication channel. Moreover, the stack used by FreeSWITCH is the Sofia SIP Stack, which is a completely robust and mature stack for any type of VoIP software development.

It supports sRTP, WebRTC, TCP, TLS, SIP, H.323 and similar technologies and protocols. It runs on FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS, ARM, and Windows based servers. Each call or channel operating on the FreeSWITCH platform functions as an individual and separate thread to provide more elasticity to the whole architecture.

 Functionality

Asterisk has been offering PBX (Private Branch Exchange) features to provide the base, which can be used to build different VoIP solutions. On the other hand, FreeSWITCH is more like a VoIP Softswitch, which has all features of an IP PBX solution. In addition to that, it also has features of Softswitch, which makes it more sturdy and reliable to develop different types of VoIP products and solutions. You get more features and functionalities already developed in the framework, so you don’t need to invest added resources while building a solution. You can also use SignalWire API integration to add missing features in the process of FreeSWITCH development.

 It means FreeSWITCH has way more features and functionalities to offer compared to Asterisk. Thus, switching to FreeSWITCH from Asterisk for your project or software will give access to a pool of features, which were not available with Asterisk.

Flexibility

Without a doubt, FreeSWITCH is a way more flexible platform compared to Asterisk because a FreeSWITCH development company can use multiple development platforms and languages, which is not supported by Asterisk. For FreeSWITCH development services, all major development frameworks and platforms are accessible such as Python, C++, JavaScript, Perl, .NET, etc. This not only gives the flexibility to choose the right development platform, but it also lets a FreeSWITCH custom development company can use FreeSWITCH libraries and embed them with any other business or communication apps to build a comprehensive communication system, which is not possible with Asterisk. This is another major reason to switch your existing Asterisk project to FreeSWITCH.

Scalability

This is one of the most vital driving factors that lead businesses to switch their project to FreeSWITCH from Asterisk. FreeSWITCH is way more scalable than Asterisk. Asterisk uses the concept of shared resources. Unlike that, FreeSWITCH uses a modular architecture to use each call line as a unique and individual line. Due to this fundamental difference, both Asterisk and FreeSWITCH have a huge difference in building scalable solutions. A FreeSWITCH development company can develop more scalable solutions, which would not face challenges like race conditions, deadlocking, data corruption, etc.

This characteristic of FreeSWITCH ensures that VoIP software development using FreeSWITCH can handle way bigger call volume than Asterisk. Thus, it is recommended to switch to FreeSWITCH.

3.  What is the process of migrating from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH?

As discussed in this blog post, in several aspects FreeSWITCH is more reliable and gives outstanding performance compared to Asterisk. Thus, it is necessary to use FreeSWITCH over Asterisk if you really want to have a competitive solution whether it is an IP PBX solution or VoIP Softswitch.

If you already have a communication system developed using Asterisk, you can simply migrate to the newer one. A successful migration requires a complete process to follow along with reliable FreeSWITCH development services. Following is the complete migration process that you can follow if you have in-house FreeSWITCH developers or you can simply take the help of a reliable company offering the migration service.

Making a plan for migration

The migration process needs team, development, money, time, and several other resources in place to make it a successful and smooth transition from one system to another. Usually, Asterisk and FreeSWITCH solutions will have a GUI, which makes the system easy to use and it also hides the technology used in building a communication solution, whether it is Asterisk or FreeSWITCH. However, there are several other aspects associated with the switch such as downtime of the system, training of using a more powerful platform, data backup and recovery, etc. All this needs to be planned to ensure minimum hiccups are faced during or after the process of migration.

The best approach for migrating from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH is defining all the different stages of migration and making a detailed plan along with details of roles and responsibilities on who will do what. It must also have details of the timeline, when to start and by when a specific stage should be finished.

FreeSWITCH system development

You may get a ready to use FreeSWITCH solution or you might want to get it custom development. It is always good to invest in custom development because it can ensure you get all the features you desire to have in your system. Moreover, it can also ensure that you will get the exact look and feel, navigation, and other features in your FreeSWITCH solution as your Asterisk one to reduce the training and learning curve.

You can follow the same plan as your Asterisk custom development company might have prepared while building your existing system or you can also take a completely new approach to enhance your system altogether by using the full potential of the platform.

Whether you use a ready to use system or go for the development of the platform from scratch, it will require you to do some sort of development to customize the system as per your business need.

Taking up backup

Once the FreeSWITCH system development stage is over, the real migration process gets started. You will need to first take the backup of the existing Asterisk solution. It is a must process as it will help after the migration process. Take a backup of each and every file and record from the system and if possible save multiple copies of the backup on different platforms or systems to avoid any ordeal.

Running migration process

Once you have built the FreeSWITCH platform and taken the backup, this is the time for migrating to the most powerful platform. The migration process is often technical, which needs setting up the system, creating a cluster or single server model depending on the business and platform, importing backup, creating users, and more.

Recovering data

In any migration process, losing some data is normal and thus, this step has to be part of your overall migration process. You must recover data from your existing system to the new one. This can be a technical process that uses some algorithms or it can be a manual process, which needs data entry. This all depends on various factors and your technical team will handle it.

Test the platform

Once the migration process is complete, this is the time to test the platform to inspect and fix any potential bugs that were left untouched or produced in a live environment. All aspects of the software have to be inspected from data to performance, usability, volume, stress, accuracy, etc.

Training the staff

Once your system is migrated to FreeSWITCH from Asterisk and you are all ready to move to the new platform, take the last step of training your staff. The system will be completely user friendly due to the GUI platform, but it is still recommended to get your team trained by the FreeSWITCH custom development company that has built your system. This will ensure all features are explained and your team makes the best use of it.

Switch to the new platform

The last step is to switch to the new platform. There are three approaches to switching to the FreeSWITCH platform from Asterisk. You can choose any one of them based on your preference and circumstances:

Make a switch to the new process in the one go
Run two systems in parallel until your team is ready to switch to the new system
Move operations in stages to the new system

4.  How can we help you migrate from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH?

We, Inextrix Technologies, have been offering proprietary and open source VoIP development services along with multiple other services. We help businesses with our range of services to migrate from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH. You can opt for any of these services or a complete migration solution based on your requirements.

FreeSWITCH consulting service

To help you define the strategy of migration and successfully complete the process.

Development

We have a team of experienced FreeSWITCH developers that can develop any type of FreeSWITCH solution for you.

Migration

If you already have the system and need help in the migration process, our team can help you with either the FreeSWITCH consulting service or the complete migration process.

Concluding notes

FreeSWITCH platform is developed by a team of Asterisk developers that were working on the open source Asterisk development project. They have worked on all loopholes of Asterisk and therefore, made FreeSWITCH a more powerful, scalable, robust, and reliable platform to build any type of solution. Moreover, the FreeSWITCH community and enterprise version persistently improve the performance of the platform. Thus, it is a wise decision to switch to FreeSWITCH from your Asterisk platform.

If you want to switch your Asterisk based software or project to FreeSWITCH, we can help you with our FreeSWITCH development, consulting, migration, support, and other services. We have been contributing to helping businesses grow faster with more reliable and robust FreeSWITCH based products and your business can be the next one in our list of happy customers. Let’s have a detailed discussion on how we can help you in this journey of transformation. Contact us NOW!

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Top Reasons to Migrate Your Asterisk Solution to FreeSWITCH

1.  What is FreeSWITCH?

2.  Why consider FreeSWITCH over Asterisk?

Major driving factors that standout in FreeSWITCH