No matter how you look at it, we all know Open Source is better, free to use and you get access to the code. VoIP traditionally uses H.323, a rather complicated protocol that uses multiple ports and a binary code for data. But apps like FreeSWITCH make H.323 seem like a piece of cake with its all-in-one application. Here is a quick review on 10 useful applications for VoIP.
1. FreeSWITCH – FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products scaling from a soft-phone up to a soft-switch. It can be used as a simple switching engine, a media gateway or a media server to host IVR applications using simple scripts or XML to control the callflow. It supports communication technologies such as SIP, H.323, IAX2 and GoogleTalk making it easy to interface with other open source PBX systems such as sipX, OpenPBX, Bayonne, YATE or Asterisk.
2. Yate (Yet Another Telephony Engine) – While currently focused on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and PSTN, its power lies in its ability to be easily extended. Voice, video, data and instant messaging can all be unified under Yate’s flexible routing engine, maximizing communications efficiency and minimizing infrastructure costs for businesses, capable of handling 600 H323 calls. While currently focused on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and PSTN, its power lies in its ability to be easily extended.
3. Ekiga – Ekiga (formely known as GnomeMeeting) is an open source VoIP and video conferencing application for GNOME. Ekiga uses both the H.323 and SIP protocols. It supports many audio and video codecs, and is interoperable with other SIP compliant software and also with Microsoft NetMeeting.
4. XMeeting – XMeeting is the first H.323 compatible video conferencing client for Mac OS X. In addition, XMeeting also supports the popular SIP protocol used by many VoIP applications. The client is highly compatible and has many additional features, so that it can be used for most private and business video conferencing tasks.
5. OpenH323 Project – The OpenH323 project provides full featured, interoperable, Open Source implementation of the ITU H.323 teleconferencing protocol that can be used by personal developers and commercial users without charge.
6. OpenH323 Gatekeeper – The GNU Gatekeeper (GnuGk) is a full featured H.323 gatekeeper, available freely under GPL license. It forms the basis for a free IP telephony system (VOIP).
7. BSDRadius – BSDRadius is open source RADIUS server targeted for use in Voice over IP (VoIP) applications. While there are quite large number of Radius servers (including free) available in the world, little number of them (if any) are developed with VoIP specific needs in mind. Typical VoIP RADIUS server should be able to take high amount of AAA requests in short time periods, handle large databases, and respond timely to prevent time-outs and request retransmission cases. Most commonly used VoIP protocols (SIP and H.323) use small number of Authentication methods (e.g. CHAP and Digest), and this can allow reduce processing overhead and code size of server.