What Nobody Tells You Before Hiring FreeSWITCH Developers for Your First Telecom Project
I’ve watched a lot of companies get burned on their first FreeSWITCH project. Not because FreeSWITCH itself failed them the platform is solid but because they walked in with assumptions that don’t survive contact with real telecom infrastructure.
Most of those assumptions start with hiring.
You post a job listing, you look for someone who knows C, maybe some Lua, has “VoIP experience” on their resume. You think that’s enough. And about three months in, you’re staring at a system that technically works but drops calls under load, can’t negotiate codecs properly with half your carriers, and nobody on the team understands why.
I’ve been on both sides of this building FreeSWITCH solutions from scratch and cleaning up projects where the initial team got stuck. Here’s what I wish someone had told me before our very first deployment.
FreeSWITCH is not “just another software project”
This is the biggest misconception. Teams treat FreeSWITCH development like they would any backend service - spin it up, write some logic, ship it. But telecom doesn’t work that way.
FreeSWITCH sits at the intersection of networking, real-time media, telephony protocols, and carrier operations. A developer who can write beautiful Python or Java but has never debugged a SIP INVITE that’s getting mangled by a NAT device is going to struggle. Badly.
The first project I worked on, we hired two senior backend engineers. Smart guys, great coders. Took them almost a month just to get comfortable reading SIP traces. Another two weeks before they understood why their dialplan changes weren’t behaving the way the documentation suggested. That’s not a knock on them — it’s a knock on our hiring assumptions.
When you hire FreeSWITCH developers, you’re not just hiring coders. You’re hiring people who understand telephony at a protocol level. SIP, RTP, SRTP, codec negotiation, ofer/answer model, oute headers, registration behavior — this stuff isn’t something you pick up from a weekend tutorial.
The dialplan is where most first projects go sideways
FreeSWITCH’s XML dialplan is powerful. It’s also where inexperienced teams create the most damage.
I’ve inherited projects where the dialplan had grown into a 4,000-line XML file that nobody fully understood anymore. Conditions layered on conditions, regex patterns that only worked for specific carriers, hardcoded IPs scattered everywhere. Any change felt risky because nobody could predict the side effects.
What experienced FreeSWITCH developers do differently: they think about the dialplan as architecture, not configuration. They separate concerns early — inbound routing logic, outbound carrier selection, internal extension handling, failover paths. They use Lua or embedded scripting for complex decision-making instead of trying to force everything into XML conditions.
If the person you’re hiring can’t articulate how they’d structure a dialplan for a system that handles both inbound DID routing and outbound least-cost routing across three carriers — that’s a red flag.
Codec negotiation sounds boring until it breaks your calls
This is one of those topics that nobody mentions in job interviews but causes real production pain.
Here’s a scenario I’ve seen more than once: your system works fine in testing. You go live, connect to a carrier, and suddenly half your calls have one-way audio or sound like robots. The issue? Codec mismatch. Your FreeSWITCH instance is offering G.729 but the carrier wants G.711, or worse, they’re forcing transcoding through a path that adds 200ms of latency.
A developer who’s built a FreeSWITCH solution for production knows to nail down codec profiles per carrier trunk, test the actual negotiation behavior (not just what the config says), and account for transcoding overhead in their capacity planning. Someone who’s only worked on lab setups won’t think about any of this until it’s already a customer-facing problem.
You need someone who understands carriers, not just FreeSWITCH
This was a hard lesson for us. We had a developer who was genuinely good with FreeSWITCH internals — modules, event socket, the whole stack. But he’d never dealt with a carrier interconnect in his life.
When we tried to connect our first SIP trunk, he didn’t know what a tech prefix was. Had no idea that some carriers require specific From header formats or that registration-based trunks behave differently from IP authentication trunks. He’d never had to work through a carrier’s LOA process or deal with their provisioning team’s requirements.
Telecom projects don’t happen in isolation. Your FreeSWITCH system has to talk to the outside world — SIP trunk providers, PSTN gateways, sometimes legacy PBX systems that speak protocols from the early 2000s. The developer who can handle that overlap between platform expertise and carrier operations is worth twice what you’d pay someone who only knows one side.
Scalability isn’t something you add later
First-time teams almost always design for “let’s just get it working” and figure out scaling afterward. With FreeSWITCH, that decision has consequences.
A single FreeSWITCH instance can handle a lot — thousands of concurrent calls on decent hardware. But the architecture around it matters. How are you handling registration? Where does your CDR data go? What happens when that single instance needs maintenance and you have 500 active calls on it?
Teams that have built FreeSWITCH solutions at scale know that you plan for clustering, failover, and session persistence from day one. Not because you need it on launch day, but because retrofitting it later means rewriting your outing logic, your media handling, and probably your monitoring setup.
When you’re evaluating someone’s experience, ask them how they’ve handled high-availability in previous deployments. If the answer is “we just ran one server and it was fine,” that might work for an internal PBX. It won’t work for a production VoIP platform.
The mod_* ecosystem is where the real leverage lives
FreeSWITCH’s power isn’t in the core it’s in the modules. mod_sofia for SIP, mod_verto for WebRTC, mod_lua and mod_python for scripting, mod_grpc for connecting to external AI services, mod_callcenter for ACD functionality.
The developer who knows which modules to reach for (and which to avoid) saves you months. I’ve seen teams try to build their own call queuing logic from scratch using event socket because they didn’t know mod_callcenter existed. I’ve seen others avoid mod_verto entirely and build a separate WebRTC gateway because nobody on the team had worked with it before.
This is domain knowledge that comes from doing multiple projects, not from reading documentation. When you’re hiring, ask people to walk you through which modules they’ve used in production and why. The depth of that answer tells you everything.
Don’t skip the “boring” operations stuff
There’s a pattern I see with first telecom projects: all the energy goes into features call routing, IVR menus, conferencing, API integrations. Nobody thinks about the operational foundation until something breaks at 2 AM.
Experienced developers will push you to set up proper logging from day one not just FreeSWITCH’s internal logs, but structured SIP trace logging that you can actually search through when a customer reports a call quality issue three days later. They’ll want monitoring on registration counts, active channels, CPU utilization during transcoding peaks, and failed call ratios per carrier trunk.
They’ll also bring up CDR storage and processing early. How are you capturing call detail records? Where are they going? Can you run billing queries against them, or are they just sitting in a log file that rotates weekly? If VoIP billing is part of your roadmap, the CDR pipeline needs to be designed properly from the start, not bolted on when the finance team starts asking questions.
So what should you actually look for?
After going through this enough times, here’s what I screen for now when I’m looking to bring FreeSWITCH expertise onto a project:
Protocol-level SIP knowledge. Can they read a SIP trace cold and tell you where the call is failing? Do they understand the difference between a 486 and a 603? Can they explain offer/answer and how codec negotiation actually works in practice?
Production deployment experience. Lab projects and tutorials are fine for learning, but you need someone who’s dealt with carrier interconnects, NAT traversal headaches, outing table management, and the kinds of problems that only show up at scale.
Module fluency. Which mod_* components have they actually used in a live system? Can they explain tradeoffs between different approaches like when to use mod_lua versus the event socket for external application control?
Operational thinking. Do they talk about monitoring, logging, failover, and capacity planning? Or do they only talk about features? The best FreeSWITCH developers I’ve worked with spend as much time on reliability as they do on functionality.
Carrier and integration experience. Have they set up SIP trunks with real carriers? Have they integrated FreeSWITCH with external systems CRMs, billing platforms, AI services? Telecom doesn’t live in a vacuum and you need someone who gets that.
The bottom line
Hiring for a FreeSWITCH project is not the same as hiring for a typical software build. The platform is incredibly capable, but the gap between “it compiles and runs” and “it handles production traffic reliably” is bigger than most teams expect.
If you’re early in this process, the best investment you can make is bringing in at least one person who’s been through a full deployment cycle from architecture to carrier go-live to production monitoring. That experience shapes every decision downstream, and it’s really hard to fake.
The developers who’ve done this before won’t just build your system faster. They’ll save you from the mistakes that only show up six months after launch, which is when it’s expensive to fix them.
