Case Study: SIP Trunking Management with FreeSBC at NETCOM in Cyprus

Background

NETCOM is a privately held regional network services company based in Cyprus. Offering internet, voice over IP, IP-PBX and hosting, NETCOM services business and residential customers across the Mediterranean island nation. More recently, NETCOM has expanded their service offering to include full-featured IP-PBX and business communications services, utilizing FreeSWITCH, an open-source telephony platform.

“Maintaining network reliability and scaling are key objectives for our business, requiring a redundant SIP architecture for all elements of our network”

— Pawel Klimecki, Network Engineer, NETCOM

Challenges

Reliability – To support their growing business, Pawel Klimecki, NETCOM Network Engineer noted that “maintaining network reliability and scaling are key objectives for our growing business, requiring a redundant SIP architecture for all elements of our network”.  This meant redundant call servers and a redundant session border controller solution that could route traffic around a failed call server.

SIP Trunking Routing – Providing low-cost local and international calling access requires working with multiple wholesale carriers.   NETCOM chose to work with three separate SIP-based wholesale operators to keep operating costs low and provide high reliability.   Directing traffic to three operators requires a means to intelligently route outbound call traffic and detect network outages.

FreeSWITCH Compatibility – a key element required to deliver business services, the FreeSWITCH telephony platform is central to NETCOM’s network.  Compatibility with FreeSWITCH was considered imperative when searching for a software-based session border controller.

Protection Against Attack – Addressing the issue of network security, Pawel noted: “To protect their network from potential attack, we knew we needed a session border controller that could protect against denial of service (DOS) attacks, registration floods and other attacks.”

Cost of Operation – As a small organization, maintaining low operating costs are critical for NETCOM.   “Open source software and low-cost subscription-based products fit our business plan, allowing us to build our customer base without major up-front costs”.

“Open source software and low-cost subscription-based products fit our business plan, allowing us to build our customer base without major up-front costs”

Solution

To fulfill these needs, Netcom selected FreeSBC by TelcoBridges, a scalable software session border controller, installing the software on a pair of redundant bare metal servers.  Deployed within the NETCOM datacenter between the FreeSWITCH telephony servers and the SIP Trunking providers, FreeSBC met the challenges to deploy reliable and cost-effective business communications services, with:

  • Deployed with full 1+1 redundancy, FreeSBC allows operations to continue should major server hardware or network equipment fail.
  • Intelligent and configurable call routing for both inbound and outbound traffic is included with FreeSBC. Managed with easy-to-configure call routing tables, FreeSBC can route outbound calls to any number of SIP Trunking carriers based on dialed number, carrier availability and load balancing. Inbound traffic can be routed based on dialed number, load balanced or based on telephony server availability.
  • Fully compatible with FreeSWITCH for both inbound and outbound call traffic, enabling IP-PBX business services.
  • Protection against network attack with line-rate protection from DOS and DDOS attacks, registration floods, mal-formed packets and other attack profiles.
  • Very Low cost of operation, available for free with self-support or optional paid subscriptions that include support as well as enhanced features.

“I’m very happy with FreeSBC.  After the installation and configuration, I completely forgot about SBC – that’s how it should be done”

Results

A final comment from Pawel on his experience with FreeSBC: “I’m very happy with FreeSBC.  After the installation and configuration, I completely forgot about SBC – that’s how it should be done”

The reliability, call routing capabilities, and low subscription pricing of FreeSBC proved to be an excellent solution for NETCOM.  Learn how FreeSBC can meet your needs at: www.freesbc.com