By KATHLEEN GALLAGHER

Pehr Anderson went to a telecommunications software conference in Chicago to learn more about FreeSwitch, a cutting-edge software used in his voice technology company's research labs.

What he didn't expect to learn was that the mastermind behind FreeSwitch -- a free program that helps developers build Internet- based phone systems -- was operating out of the basement of a Brookfield home.

From his desk next to a vintage 1980s "High Speed" pinball machine, FreeSwitch mastermind Anthony Minessale II works with customers and fellow programmers in far-flung places such as Africa, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and Silicon Valley.

A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee dropout -- the curriculum was too "Old World," he says -- Minessale is the primary author of the popular software program that could help change the way voice communications are transmitted and how much it costs to transmit them.

Software developers are using FreeSwitch to build new ways for moving voice communications over the Internet as easily as they move through conventional telephone wires.

"He's got a global community of people using and feeding solutions into this nexus. This is the coming core infrastructure for how carriers route voice traffic in the future," said Anderson, vice president of platform technology at harQen LLC, a Milwaukee voice-to-Web audio company. Anderson also was a co-founder of NBX Corp., an early developer of network-based phone systems acquired by 3Com Corp. for $90 million in 1999.

The advanced voice services built on FreeSwitch get handled by servers as a routine piece of Internet traffic, Anderson said.

Big telephone companies have closely guarded telephone technology for years. But open source projects -- where developers publicly collaborate to create the software -- like FreeSwitch and its competitor, Asterisk, are breaking through those secrets, Minessale said.

Unlimited calling plans show the phone industry's weakening clout, he said. And that's just the beginning.

"We're going to empower all these people to come up with crazy ideas," said Minessale, 39. "It empowers a new market."

FreeSwitch has wide appeal because it helps create voice systems that can do things like tell which line a colleague is using or allow a user to park a call so a co-worker can pick it up. FreeSwitch developers can work in any computer language and link to any network, said Kristian Kielhofner, co-founder of Star2Star Communications, a Sarasota, Fla., company that provides Internet phone service.

Minessale and his team -- Michael Jerris in Michigan and Brian West in Oklahoma -- had day jobs selling toll-free and fax/e-mail services for a Web hosting company. They got interested in telephony software while researching ways to manage calls to its customer service center. Minessale became a star developer for Asterisk, but crashes and other issues prompted him to start developing an alternative.

He launched the FreeSwitch project in January 2006, and three years later, Internet searches for have leaped. Minessale and his team are earning a living using FreeSwitch to design products for Barracuda Networks, a Silicon Valley maker of security and network products. Their CudaTel communications server that provides voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, phone systems for businesses came to market in August.

"We conducted a pretty in-depth search and evaluated a lot of technologies in the marketplace and found FreeSwitch to be enterprise class, easy to use and affordable," said Sean Heiney, Barracuda's director of new product initiatives.

Minessale and his team also are making money through a support company they run called FreeSwitch Solutions.

Meanwhile, Kielhofner says he and other developers are so "smitten" with the way FreeSwitch is helping them power their telephone and fax companies without the $100,000 or more a commercial software would cost them that he wrote a first-ever testimonial blog post.

"It's as if Anthony, Brian, Michael and everyone else on the FreeSwitch team are constantly sitting around, agonizing every detail of this awesome piece of software just as Hanz, Fritz and Karl are in Munich agonizing over every detail for the next BMW 7 Series," Kielhofner wrote.

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