by Ray Horak, Technology Editor
Digium, Inc., the Asterisk Company, announces the release of Asterisk 1.8, a significant update that includes more than 200 enhancements, including new security features, integration with IPv6 and extensive additions to ISDN-BRI functionality for European users. Asterisk 1.8 is designated as a Long Term Support release, indicating a minimum four years of support from Digium.
Asterisk 1.8 includes contributions from hundreds of community developers, as well as the Digium development team. Asterisk 1.8 updates include:
- Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) support: End-to-end VoIP encryption of signaling and media
- Security event framework: Modular capability for collecting and distributing system security events
- ISDN BRI functionality: Call completion services, connected party identification, ETSI advice of charge (AOC), message waiting indicator (MWI), call rerouting and call deflection
- Session Initiation Protocol (SIP): Substantial increase in the speed of registrations, Transport Layer Security (TLS) improvements and more flexible Network Address Translation (NAT) handling
- IPv6 support
- Calendar integration: Support for Microsoft Exchange, CalDav and iCalendar
- Google Talk and Google Voice: Support for inbound and outbound calling
- Voice codecs: Support for 16 kHz signed linear media streams and additional HD voice codecs
- PacketCable NCS 1.0 support
I had the opportunity to discuss some of the key ingredients of Asterisk 1.8 with Steve Sokol, Digium’s Asterisk Marketing Director. According to Sokol, “Technologists from the end user, carrier and developer communities have downloaded more than two million copies of Asterisk during the past 12 months to create phone systems and voice applications such as IP PBXs, voice gateways, voicemail and interactive voice response (IVR) systems, conference bridges, and automatic call distributors (ACDs) for call centers. It is essential that we carefully monitor the technology demand curve so that Asterisk retains its position of leadership in open source solutions. As an example, the demand has been consistently growing for secure calling over SIP with SRTP. As a member of the SIP forum, Digium not only monitors the progress of SIP standards, but actively influences the development of industry-wide technical recommendations and best-practice implementation guides dealing with interoperability. There also is strong demand building for IPv6 support, particularly in Asia, and increasingly so in North America. So, we built support for SRTP and IPv6 into Asterisk 1.8. We have already begun to spec out Asterisk 1.10, which we anticipate releasing in October 2011.”
Digium offers Asterisk software free to the open source community and offers Switchvox IP PBX software to power a broad family of both turnkey VoIP systems and customizable telephony solutions for the SMB and enterprise markets. Asterisk 1.8 is released under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). It is free of charge and available for download at http://www.asterisk.org. Professional support is available from Digium on the basis of subscriptions that range from a Basic Level 1 plan for small installation to the Flagship Level 4 enterprise plan. More at www.digium.com.
