TADSummit EMEA Americas 2021 Open Source Telecom Survey 2021 Results & Discussion Alan Quayle, Independent Consultant in Programmable Communications This is our 3rd year of the survey, thank you for your continued support. We received 114 responses to the general survey, +163 project survey responses giving a total of 277 received. The general survey covered: Security, Serverless, STIR/SHAKEN, barriers and benefits of OSS, telcos and OSS, Training, IoT, and general geographic / category info. Training: An interesting dichotomy is where people do not expect to pay for training when investigating a project but will pay when the project is part of their business. MOOC.org pricing is interesting. It’s free if you just want to learn, if you want the training recognized, then there’s a fee. This enables people to investigate for free, and then if they require support, the training needs to be verified. This avoids training through support. Open Source telecom software is part of a suite of open source projects used. Perhaps we should investigate dominant architectures? Companies that use open source make a long-term commitment to building an organization that understands open source, and is committed to owning the product, its roadmap, and the customer experience. Companies successful with open source do not happen overnight, they are built over years. Documentation, documentation, documentation Check out Twilio – but we need to find a way to help solve this industry-wide issue. Recommendations on what we need to do as an industry.

1. Open Source Telecom Software
Survey 2021

2. 2019/2020 Results Review

3. Three Surveys
© Alan Quayle, 2021
2020
2019
http://alanquayle.com/2019/12/deeper-dive-
into-the-open-source-telecom-projects/
• Broad review of most of the open
source projects, and common
deployment issues
• Filling in gaps on geography,
contributions, deeper dive into hosting
/ redundancy, plus missing projects
(drachtio, ASTPP, RTP Engine, etc.)
http://alanquayle.com/2020/07/open-source-
2020-survey/

4. Three Surveys
© Alan Quayle, 2021
2021
https://alanquayle.com/2021/06/open-source-
telecom-software-survey-2021/
• Broad review of the popular open
source projects, focus on security,
serverless, telco, training,
STIR/SHAKEN, IoT, and adoption
barriers.

5. Contents
● 2019 Recapitulation
● 2020 Recapitulation
● 2021 Introduction
● General Survey Results
● Project Survey: Asterisk
● Project Survey: OpenSIPS
● Project Survey: Kamailio
● Project Survey: FreeSWITCH
● Project Survey: SIPCapture-HOMER
● Project Survey: Jambonz and Drachtio
● Project Survey: Wazo
© Alan Quayle, 2021
● Project Survey: Vicidial
● Project Survey: Jitsi
● Project Survey: RTPEngine
● Project Survey: FreePBX
● Appendix 1: 2020 Results
Please note, if a Project Survey,
or a section in the General
Survey received less than 5
responses, the results are not
shown as its difficult to draw any
meaningful conclusions.

6. Which OSPs do you use? Responses %
Asterisk 71 75%
FreeSWITCH 39 41%
Kamailio 41 43%
OpenSIPS 51 54%
Restcomm/Mobicents 3 3%
© Alan Quayle, 2021
2019 Recapitulation

7. Comparison: Does the developer community make itself accessible for
participation (closed – OK – Open (with lots of fast help (hours) and dev
events))?
Asterisk FreeSWITCH
Kamailio OpenSIPS
© Alan Quayle, 2019

8. Comparison: How easy is it to engage with the community on features/issues
that are important to you? (difficult (no/slow response) – OK (responses can
take days) – good (rapid response, within hours, day max))
Asterisk FreeSWITCH
Kamailio OpenSIPS
© Alan Quayle, 2019

9. Comparison: Do you find it easy to hire knowledgeable consultants, or
otherwise access operational support for the platform from outside your
immediate organization (easy – OK - hard)
Asterisk FreeSWITCH
Kamailio OpenSIPS
© Alan Quayle, 2019

10. A Few Take-Aways
● For configuration management / scripting, the answer is
Ansible
○ Should each project share popular scripts to aid adoption and setup?
● Native Cloud (AWS, Google, etc.) is not a popular choice
● Geography
○ Some in Europe were surprised at the size of the Asterisk responses, it
would be interesting to map how the projects are adopted around the world
● There’s still much we can do together as a global community
to accelerate open source adoption
© Alan Quayle, 2019

11. 2020 Survey Recapitulation (87 Responses)
© Alan Quayle, 2021

12. © Alan Quayle, 2021
India: Speed of response
Australia and NZ: Speed of response
Russia: Language barriers
Central and South America: Language barriers
Europe: Finding knowledgeable consultants
North America: Finding knowledgeable consultants
Distributed team: Speed of response
Middle East: Speed of response
2020 Survey Recapitulation

13. © Alan Quayle, 2021
Documentation is critical, also it must be up to
date with the current release – specific
comments were made multiple times.
Documentation needs a dedicated expert with
translation support (Google translate is not good
enough, check out #googletranslatefails for a
laugh). Given even Twilio has limited non-
English document support I think its too much
for open source projects to support.
2020 Survey Recapitulation

14. • Training
• Development / Design
• VoIP Service / Applications (cloud /
premise / platform)
• WebRTC Applications
• Softswitch services
• Contact center applications
• Asterisk
• Maintenance of VoIP networks and services
• Consulting
• General OSS / RTC Development /
Deployment
• Predictive dialing, inbound acd, pbx
• Audit Services
© Alan Quayle, 2021
Do you provide consulting for other companies on how to
deploy / manage / scale open source projects?
• Security
• OSS for Call Centers (ViciDial &
OpenSIPS)
• Network consulting
• RTC design / experience
• Premise architecture, hardware,
networking and configuration
• Managed / Hosted VoIP networks / services
• Installation, Customization, High availability
and Scalable setups for Open Source projects.
• Telco Consulting
• IMS on Kubernetes (based on Kamailio)
• OpenStack, Kubernetes, IAC
• RTC OSS strategy
2020 Survey Recapitulation

15. © Alan Quayle, 2021
A cautious approach to Serverless,
no geographic differences. We’ll
explore this more in TADSummit
EMEA / Americas in November.
2020 Survey Recapitulation

16. Drachtio / Jambonz: Strengths, Weaknesses, Future
• Project Strengths
• Leverages public cloud computing, auto scaling, and top-notch maintainer.
• Aimed at area of market (SME) that is poorly served at present.
• Relatively new, easy to glue other projects together to fill gaps.
• Project Weaknesses
• No sms stack, TTS, conferencing, messaging etc.. and many other components that make it a complete CPaaS
enablement solution.
• Needs the community to take it to the next level.
• Risk: big companies with larger development budgets
• No legacy support.
• More documentation, tutorials, examples
• Future
• I think it’s too late to make a real impact.
• Game changer in CPaaS
• Hard to say
• Likely to be successful
© Alan Quayle, 2021
Time is critical to confidence in open
source projects. They need to prove
they’ll be here for the long-run.
2020 Survey Recapitulation

17. © Alan Quayle, 2021
Drachtio / Jambonz Community
A respectable
result given the
youth of the
project and the
commitment of
Dave Horton.
2020 Survey Recapitulation

18. RTPEngine: Strengths, Weaknesses, Future
• Project Strengths
• Stability and features
• Quality code, responsiveness of core team
• Feature rich and scalable
• Very efficient at what it does
• Integration with Kamailio, features, performance
• Project Weaknesses
• Better documentation with more examples
• Monitoring and performance checks could be improved.
• Ideally the system would include a turn server
• Future
• Not expecting changes
• Would like plugin architecture for tapping into media stream
• Future of Sipwise within ALE
• Strategy is not clear
• Awesome
© Alan Quayle, 2021
2020 Survey Recapitulation

19. © Alan Quayle, 2021
RTPEngine: Community
2020 Survey Recapitulation

20. • Security
• Repeat 2019 broader survey
• More details on existing platforms
• More telco core stuff, role of OSS in IMS, 5G SA, etc.
• Ask about API-related features being used inside of Asterisk, for
example, do you use AMI? ARI? AGI? FastAGI?
• Track serverless adoption
• Can we get web developers perspectives on the OS projects?
• Make it an annual survey and track progress of projects over time
© Alan Quayle, 2021
Topics we should address in 2021
2020 Survey Recapitulation