*Enhances FreePBX project, an open source telephony management GUI
Bandwidth.com has made several recent announcements about their progress with VoIP, so we took the opportunity to speak with Todd Barr, vice president of marketing, and Philippe Lindheimer, FreePBX project lead and director of Open Source Community. Bandwith.com is a 10-year-old company that moved to offer VoIP services as a CLEC about three years ago with a nationwide backbone that covers about 95% of the U.S. population. The company has more than 5,000 customers. While it principally targets the small and midsize market, bandwidth.com disclosed about 30% of its revenues come from larger enterprises, evidence of its progress with larger companies.
In the first announcement, the FreePBX project (sponsored by Bandwidth.com) has made available a developer’s preview of FreePBX version three (v3). FreePBX is a popular open source telephony management GUI and it serves as a basis for the management interfaces in AsteriskNOW and Trixbox CE, along with other open source PBX distributions. It has been downloaded more than 3 million times, and counts approximately 300,000 active phone systems, according to the company. Along with improvements to the features, the new version is intended to make the telephony engine agnostic, provide an improved modular and extensible approach to encourage the further platform development, and offer “best-of-breed” foundational software.
Supporting the release of FreePBX v3, Bandwidth.com has launched a new “Developer Sandbox” program that gives selected developers expanded access to Bandwidth.com network features. The developer program is also extended to enhance other IP communications network features such as as next-generation VoIP codecs, the T38 fax protocol, SIP-enabled SMS, and HD voice. In addition, the program encourages improved fixed-mobile convergence functionality, such as sharing one number across both mobile and landlines, along with advanced call-flows and call routing. Commenting on the developments, Barr said: “We think this is an innovative combination with both open network features and open source software.”
Our observation: companies from Microsoft to Verizon have increased their openness to third-party development. We think this not only brings benefit by extending the development community, but it also brings increased openness that is critical for multi-vendor interoperability.
