2024 marked a significant milestone for FreeSWITCH as we celebrated the 20th anniversary of ClueCon—the developers conference that gave birth to the open-source project. Starting from humble beginnings, ClueCon has grown over the years into a cornerstone of the open-source telecom community.

At the 20th anniversary conference, we gathered in Chicago and reflected on the last two decades of innovation, collaboration, and communication. 2024 had us looking both backward and ahead, from sharing stories about the first iteration of ClueCon in 2004 to predicting exciting new developments in real-time communications yet to come.

2024 also brought several robust updates to FreeSWITCH Advantage, ongoing improvements to the open-source version of FreeSWITCH, and forward-thinking discussions about the role of AI in the future of communications technology.

ClueCon 2024 Highlights

This year’s conference was held in the heart of downtown Chicago at the Drake Hotel, bringing together global developers, innovators, and FreeSWITCH enthusiasts to celebrate two decades of communications technology.

Presentations and AI Insights

Talks this year focused on new developments in telecom, and the growing influence of AI was a recurring theme across many presentations. Demos like this real-time translation application illustrate the power of AI in the industry and the creativity of innovators in this space.

The Coder Games Hackathon

The annual Coder Games Hackathon set the stage for the week, combining coding challenges, hands-on engineering competitions, and networking. Attendees built remote-controlled cars for an exciting balloon-popping battle royale match and designed Rube Goldberg Machines to hang up phones playing annoying songs.

Roundtable Discussions

ClueCon featured two roundtable panels this year. The first looked ahead to the future of AI. Moderated by Evan McGee, the AI Roundtable featured visionaries like James Tagg, Jeff Pulver, Diego Gosmar, Kristian Kielhofner, and FreeSWITCH founder Anthony Minessale. Discussions centered on AI's impact on telecom, current use cases, hurdles to overcome, and its role in shaping the future.

The second roundtable looked back over the years of FreeSWITCH. Luca Pradovera hosted this special panel with core developers, including Jakub Karolczyk, Chris Rienzo, Michael Jerris, Brian West, and Anthony Minessale, exploring FreeSWITCH's evolution and its critical role in modern telecom solutions.

20th Anniversary Celebration

As much as ClueCon is about innovation and learning, it’s also about community, networking, and fun. For the 20th anniversary, the main highlight of our evening events was the Gigabit Reception, where attendees enjoyed games, snacks, cocktails, and a 20th-anniversary cake before belting out their favorite songs at karaoke.

ClueCon 2024 was a perfect mix of work, play, and memories to last a lifetime. ClueCon 2025 is scheduled for August 4-7, 2025. You can get our biggest discount on tickets (over 50% off!) through February 28th. No promo code required.

2024 FreeSWITCH Updates

FreeSWITCH Advantage Updates

In 2024, several updates were rolled out over the course of the year for FreeSWITCH Advantage, the enterprise branch that includes support and commercial modules. Highlights include:

• Core Enhancements: New APIs for packet handling, Opus PLC stats, and improved codec selection.

• Stability Fixes: Addressed issues like memory leaks, DTLS race conditions, and unit-test improvements.

• Platform Updates: Support for FFmpeg 6/7, updated libsrtp to 2.6.0, and Dockerfile optimizations.

• Removed Legacy Modules: To streamline the project, we retired old modules like mod_gsmopen, mod_cepstral, and others.

FreeSWITCH Advantage ensures the highest level of support, security, and stability from its creators. However, we’re still committed to regularly updating the open-source version!

FreeSWITCH v1.10.12 Release

To kick off ClueCon week, we released FreeSWITCH v1.10.12. This release focused on stability improvements, bug fixes, and ARM64 support, ensuring continued reliability and performance. Key updates included:

• Dropped support for Debian 10 Buster and CentOS

• Improved session thread pools and softtimer stability

• Enhanced ICE/DTLS performance and logging

• Fixes to codec issues, race conditions, and RTP handling

Looking ahead to 2025

As we prepare for 2025, the FreeSWITCH community remains a driving force in open-source communications. Save the date for ClueCon 2025: August 4-7 at the Swissotel Chicago! Join our community at the original developers conference as we build the future of telecom together.

Sign up for the FreeSWITCH newsletter, add us on Slack, or follow the forum to get regular updates and offers on all things FreeSWITCH and ClueCon. See you in 2025!