When Bandwidth.com said earlier this month it plans to expose its network functionality to open-source telephony developers, many viewed the development as a milestone for open-source telephony.
Announced at the ClueCon Open Source Telephony Developers Conference, Bandwidth.com’s new Developer Sandbox Program will give a small group of two dozen or so developers access to IP communications network functionality, including next-gen VoIP codes and HD voice, as well as fixed-mobile convergence technology from CounterPath Corp. and Ditech Networks. The Sandbox will also build on the FreePBX open-source telephony project, which Bandwidth.com has supported since November of last year.
For many advocates, the developer program from Bandwidth.com – a nationwide CLEC with its own all-IP network – marks a coming of age for open source. It coincides with a number of other recent developments, including the highly anticipated release of the beta version of Skype for Asterisk, the open-source PBX from Digium. A confluence of factors could finally be opening a path for open-source PBX and VoIP service to become mainstream technologies.
For just as many, though, open source remains a niche market that stands little chance of ever penetrating the mainstream market.
An ’Engine-Agnostic’ PBX
“I'm still an open-source skeptic,” said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president for enterprise research at Yankee Group. Open source is “popular for telecom operators to experiment with but lacks the deployments in production environments to create mass deployments.”
That could change if the Bandwidth.com strategy succeeds. “We are trying to get developers to build more unique applications and give them network functionality, so they can work on converged-type applications, not just something that’s on the premises,” Todd Barr, vice president of marketing for Bandwidth.com, told VON. Bandwidth.com hopes to drive the development of applications that will use its network – the company is freely investing in open-source software that will complement its network services core business. The newly released version of FreePBX, version 3, is “engine agnostic” – that is, it will support open-source telephony platforms such as FreeSWITCH and Asterisk.
Supporting this play is new data on the market penetration of open-source PBXs overall. According to John Malone, of the research and consulting firm Eastern Management Group, open-source PBX now accounts for 18 percent of the overall PBX market – which is larger than any single manufacturer of conventional PBXs. That’s a surprising number, but it’s backed up by EMG’s survey of 7000 companies, of various sizes. The open-source PBX market grew 40 percent in 2008, according to the study.
There’s still “a prevailing, though incorrect, perception that open-source PBX is a niche product with few followers,” wrote Malone. “Such thinking is about to come to a halt.”