From Socalwifi.org

Voice over IP Project

Voice over IP has seen some very aggressive adoption rates around the world. Hopefully it will take off here in the United States as well with the launch of the SoCal WiFI network.

Numerous early adopters have implemented VoIP and systems using Linux with (Asterisk/freeswitch/call weaver/yate/bayonne) and MythTV/VideoLanClient in a wide variety of home, educational and corporate/campus deployments. So we know that these technologies and implementations work great on a LAN where systems and network engineers can control it end to end and provide proper QoS support, VLAN isolation etc.

How does that translate into a carrier grade VoIP/IPTV infrastructure for a market of 10 to 20 million people or so (lots of people in Southern Californa region)? The goal of this portion of the project is to figure that out.

Involved Components

What are the components involved in a carrier grade VoIP/IPTV deployment? This article has a complete case study on a carrier grade SIP deployment).

Softswitch / Media Gateway / Signaling Server / Session Control / Routing / PBX (VoIP)

I list all of the above components together as they are highly interrelated.

Freeswitch works well here. Check out its feature set for more on what it can do. There has been recent collaboration between Freeswitch and sipX as well. Probably want to throw OpenSER into the mix at some point.

2) Billing / provisioning (Operational Support System)

You could use something like Jbilling or Freeside for this functionality.

3) Customer Premise Equipment.

This can take many many forms. Anything from a free soft phone on Windows/Linux/Mac to a high end Cisco desk phone. You could try and standardize on one particular supported configuration, but this may require you to supply hardware to the customer which increases your cost. You could also go with a soft phone option. Or alternatively you can try and support everything.

MythTV frontend could be customized to provide television/VoIP service at the customer site.

4) The network. The SoCal WiFI network will be engineered for latency sensitive applications such as IPTV and VoIP.

5) The system back end hardware. This can easily be done with mid range HP or Dell servers. Most likely should use a SAN or NAS. Maybe a distributed file system to keep floor space consumption down.

Also look into ATCA.