On Friday 14 November 2008, Henning Westerholt wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> recently some statement came to my attention that "there is a common
> consent that the current design/architecture of [..] OpenSER (inherited
> from SER) is no longer able to deliver and to meet the present
> requirements and demands".
>
> I don't want to argue that much about this opinion, in fact the demands
> to a Voice over IP solution depends very much on the certain setup. But
> i want to share some details from my experiences in developing and
> operating a big VoIP infrastructure here at 1&1.
>
> We've about 2 million customers on our platform, that uses over 5
> million individual numbers and terminate about 1 billion minutes per
> month. We're able to provide a good service with the actual
> architecture of OpenSER without any real problems. Of course there is
> always some room for improvements, but so far the main challenges we
> faced were not in the scalability or performance areas. More important
> issues are e.g. the inherent complexity of the SIP protocol and the
> maintainance of a good quality assurance and integration process.
>
> We started some years ago with OpenSER 0.9.5, which we then extended a
> lot in house. For example we implemented more than 25 own modules, a
> own path implementation, did a lot of bug fixing and workarounds for
> certain problems we've found. We're able to reduce this amount of
> proprietary code a lot in the past, because of progress in the OpenSER
> development, intregration of our "key" modules and a lot of other
> contributions. We're using now something between OpenSER 1.3 and
> Kamailio 1.4 with only a few private extensions.
>
> So in my opinion the actual design of our server is not "[..] an
> inevitable dead-end that needs to be avoided.". I rather think that
> we'll be able with continuing improvements to tackle the upcoming
> challenges well, especially as we will work together in the future with
> the SER developers in improving important areas of this software.
>
> But this is just my personal opinion, everybody is of course free to
> have their own position.
>
> With best regards,
>
> Henning Westerholt
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