Digium updates open source UC platform.
By Larry Hettick, Network World
Digium has introduced Asterisk 10, providing extensive updates to the open source communications platform that enhance its voice and video capabilities.
Digium touts the new wide-band media engine as the most important new feature in Asterisk 10, replacing Asterisk's telephony-grade media engine with support for studio-quality audio that includes high and ultra-high definition voice.
Digium also updated Asterisk's support in the latest release for several new codecs, including Skype's SILK codec, 32kHz Speex support and pass-through support for CELT (Constrained Energy Lapped Transform, a compression technique used for high quality audio).
Other added Asterisk 10 features include:
- A new conferencing application, replacing the MeetMe conferencing bridge with an HD-capable intelligent bridge application called ConfBridge.
- Support for videoconferencing since using ConfBridge capabilities to relay video of a designated speaker or the current speaker to other participants in the conference.
- New fax capabilities with T.38 gateway capabilities that allow outgoing fax calls from analog fax machines to be connected to T.38 fax endpoints over SIP; incoming T.38 fax calls can be delivered directly to fax machines.
- Text message routing has been added to the existing capability to send and receive text messages; SIP MESSAGE and XMPP protocols can be used to act as a text messaging server and bridge between different messaging protocols.
Asterisk is a popular communications platform used to power telephone and other communications systems; according to Digium, it was downloaded 2 million times last year alone. Asterisk 10 news was featured late last month at AstriCon, the Asterisk User Conference & Expo, held in Denver.
