How to choose a softswitch for your VoIP business

The main question to a person, who starts a VoIP business, is how much money does he have and who does finance the start up. The answer to this question is a half of the answer to the question which softswitch to choose.

Let me explain.

If you finance your own business from your own money, then you count every penny and look only to the functionality. If your business is financed from the investor's money, then you have another reasons. Yes, it can sound funny, but functionality is only the argument, when you finance your business by yourself.

May be you have noticed some controversy in my words, so I will continue explaining.

The functionality which you need to launch the VoIP business can be found even in the software, which is distributed for free. Asterisk, FreeSwitch, OpenSIPS have the needed features and some of them are even preinstalled or preconfigured in the build. What is the obstacle to install it for your needs? It is not a vendor solution! It has no support! You cannot sign the emergency assistance contract with a party, who distributes the softswitch. Yes, it comes with no warranties and it is written with capital letters on the last line of the installation script.

What is a price for the vendor solution? It starts from 50000 USD. Yes, the basic features without extensions, customization and fine tuning. What will you get for these money? Sometimes the same things, which you get for free, but with good consultancy and prebuild config, which avoids bugs (and limits the functionality ;-))

I'm not joking. Lots of vendor's softswitch solutions are just branches of the existing popular software. It is compiled for only one kind of OS, it is bundled with one kind of drivers for one kind of hardware, it has closed source, an update module and lots of "empty slots" for licence keys.

Our R&D department was looking for a class 4 and class 5 softswitch for a big telecom company. They were travelling around the world, watching different installations, visiting vendor's offices and testing trials in the test laboratory. The result was interesting.

The most functional software is a free one. All features, which commerical systems are planned to have only "in the next year builds", open source software already has. It can be rolled out quickly, it can handle high load with proper setup, it can be administered by people, who have no specific knowledge about vendor soft and hardware. If you find the bug in the commercial softswitch, then the time, which is needed to a vendor to get rid of this bug, sometimes is more, than the time beween bug fixes of the popular open source solutions.

OK. And what are the arguments to protect the vendor's image? Easy. You cannot come to a big multinational company saying, that you will install for them a free solution! No, offer them Cisco, AVAYA, Cirpack (for the money of the client). Offer them something expensive, big companies like it, because they think, that expensive solution raise their market value. Offer them a luxury support contract. They will like it also.

Yes, sometimes there is no choice at all, I mean in some countries the telecom equipment should be licensed by a state metrological licensing institution. You cannot pass the licensing with Asterisk or FreeSwitch, so, you need to look for a vendor. But it is another story, companies have shown lots of creativity, while working with state institutions ;-)

And the final notice. It is not an antivendor propaganda, I don't tell you to vote forewer for open source solutions, the only thing, which I ask you is to think, if you have enough money to make a mistake. If your first VoIP system comes to you for money, not for free, then may be you will have a dream to change it once, but you will not have money for that. If you launch your business with free solution, then you always have money to choose something else.

Don't forget, that this system is for making business, so, free solution can add some funds, when you're already ready to change it to something, which is not distributed, but soled. Also you will find, that your personnel has the knowledge, which services are demanded by your clients and which caveats you should avoid.