In my previous post, I explained how I had written an online article reviewing what OpenSIPS is and what it does. For some reason, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, the question always comes up about how OpenSIPS differs from Asterisk. I got half way through my review of OpenSIPS and realised that this question could not be ignored. However, I always tend to write a lot and I didn't want the article to get even bigger so I decided to push the whole question off into a new post dedicated just to that one question - the difference between OpenSIPS and Asterisk.
Asterisk and OpenSIPS are undoubtedly two of the biggest beasts in the jungle of open source VoIP server applications so, if you want to get a better understanding of how they compare, just click here.
Saturday 28 January 2012
Friday 6 January 2012
All about OpenSIPS
The work that I do has taken a number of twists and turns over the 7 years since I first started as a freelance IT and VoIP consultant. Allowing oneself to be persuaded towards meeting the most prominent demands of potential customers is a 'no brainer' if you want to keep your financial head above water. Consequently, my skills and experience have been inexorably pushed towards open source solutions running on Linux servers - initially Asterisk, but also from an early date, OpenSIPS. (By the way, I plan to add FreeSWITCH to the list very soon).
When I first looked at OpenSIPS in 2006, it was called SER or SIP Express Router. The documentation was not great, but I found a good tutorial that guided you through the configuration step-by-step, adding more and more capabilities until you ended up with quite a useful application for routing SIP-based calls between IP phones and carriers with pretty good NAT traversal capabilities. Unlike Asterisk, it had a vast capacity for handling simultaneous calls and was so robust that it would run uninterrupted for months without even a hint of a problem. By contrast, we had to re-start our v1.2 Asterisk servers every night to prevent random crashes caused by memory leaks. They eventually fixed this in v1.6.
I have remained a loyal devotee of OpenSIPS through its various re-incarnations (SER to OpenSER to Kamailio and OpenSIPS). My knowledge and experience of the product has increased over the years and the documentation available online and in printed form has gradually improved. The developers have done a fantastic job adding new modules, new features and functions while maintaining the original ethos of reliability, conformance to published standards and performance. It is not a replacement for Asterisk - the two products are not designed to do the same job and in many cases the best ITSP solutions require both.
In the last 1 to 2 years, demand for support and advice about setting up OpenSIPS has mushroomed, especially from innovative businesses and small-to-medium-sized ITSP's in the USA and Canada. This convinced me to promote consultancy services for OpenSIPS as a major part of our ongoing business strategy. The final results of this push are now complete - it involved creating a new web site focussing exclusively on OpenSIPS consultancy services; registering a service-specific domain name for the site; using Google's adwords - linked to appropriate key words and phrases - to attract visitors to the site; creation of documentation suitable for downloading from the site; and finally the creation of some online articles, the first of which was completed earlier this week.
So please take a look and see what you think. The service-specific web site (and document download link) can be reached using this link: http://www.open-sip-solutions.com
The new online article which explains what OpenSIPS is and what it can do is here:
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