Bandwidth.com Adopts FreePBX; Adds New Developer

According to a recent announcement by Bandwidth.com, the company has decided to invest in FreePBX, the popular front-end interface to Asterisk-based distros.

 

Bandwidth.com is hiring the project’s developer to be its Open Source Community Developer and is providing substantial resources and effort to expand the project's scope.

 

On Friday, Technology Marketing Corporation’s Chief Technology Officer and Vice President and Founder of TMC (News - Alert) Labs, Tom Keating, sat down with Chief Developer, Philippe Lindheimer, who made the informal announcement of Bandwidth.com's commitment to FreePBX in his blog at www.freepbx.org.

 

The November 14th post, entitled, "A Bright Future for FreePBX," explained Lindheimer had joined Bandwidth.com as its new open source community director. The post stated that he and Bandwidth.com would both work to extend the scope of FreePBX and to ensure it remained open and strong.

During his discussion on Friday with Lindheimer, Keating asked if Bandwidth.com would get special treatment within the FreePBX interface, since Bandwidth.com offers SIP trunking. According to Keating, if FreePBX gives Bandwidth.com a prominent position in the GUI or they make it easier to configure FreePBX (i.e. plug-n-play) that could be a huge boost for Bandwidth.com. Lindheimer said that wasn’t part of the investment announcement, but it is something they are looking at for the future.

 

Lindheimer pointed to Bandwidth.com's efforts in purchasing the FreePBX trademark and its efforts with FreeSwitch, an open source telephony platform, as areas where the company has helped the open source community. 

 

As a VoIP and data services provider, Bandwidth.com will not add any fundamental conflict of interest by investing in FreePBX. Instead, FreePBX will most likely help Bandwidth.com by promoting its services such as SIP trunking.

 

FreePBX, a Web-based GUI, provides pre-programmed functionality and is easy-to-use on top of Asterisk (News - Alert), with features such as "follow me," ring groups with calls confirmation, music on hold, unlimited conferencing, and paging and intercom functionality for many SIP phones. 

 

In other open source news, in October, Digium added FreePBX to its compilation of the AsteriskNow 1.5 turnkey release.