Saturday, October 23, 2010

Asterisk 1.8.0 Now Available with Google Voice Support

Asterisk Open Source Project

The Asterisk Development Team announced the release of Asterisk 1.8.0.

What is Asterisk?

Asterisk is an free and open source telephony project that turns a computer into a voice communications server. Asterisk supports the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces and VoIP protocols.

Asterisk can be configured as an IP or hybrid PBX, switching calls, managing routes. It can also be built as a media gateway, bridging the legacy PSTN to IP telephony. Full list of features.

Asterisk is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).

What is version 1.8.0?

Asterisk 1.8 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release.  A Long Term Support (LTS) release is supported for 4 years. Regular Asterisk releases are made every six months, these include a year of security fixes and a two year End of Life. For a list of support timelines visit the Asterisk versions page.

What's New?

Here are some of the features included in version 1.8.0 since version 1.6.2 (the previous LTS version):

  • Google Talk and Google Voice support
  • Calendar integration (Microsoft Exchange, CalDav and iCalendar)
  • Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (or SRTP). Provides encryption & message authentication.
  • IPv6 Support in the SIP channel driver
  • Connected Party Identification Support
  • Channel Event Logging (CEL). A mechanism to provide fine-grained event info that can be used to generate billing information.
  • Distributed Device State using Jabber/XMPP
  • Multicast RTP paging
  • High-resolution timestamps for call data records (CDR) which allows users to track call times to the microsecond.

Need more info?