TMCnet Feature

It has been a busy week in Denver, Colo., at AstriCon 2011, but as the Asterisk user conference winds down, the news pouring from the event certainly hasn’t. Currently in its eighth year, AstriCon offers conference tracks focusing on technical information, carriers and call centers, cloud computing, commerce, government, enterprise and the Asterisk (News - Alert) ecosystem. Developer conferences geared toward contributors to the Asterisk and Asterisk SCF projects are also taking place during this year’s AstriCon.

Today, Digium (News - Alert), Inc., the Asterisk Company, and the Asterisk open source community, released Asterisk 10, the latest version of its Asterisk communications platform allowing developers to create powerful business phone systems and UC solutions.

According to company officials, since its introduction 12 years ago, Asterisk has been used, free of charge, in nearly every country of the world to power telephone and other communications systems. It has been downloaded millions of times, including two million last year alone, establishing Asterisk as the most popular open source telephony engine.

The newest version of Asterisk includes extensive updates enhancing both its voice and video capabilities. In addition, there are a number of new features available which offer developers, integrators, resellers and telephony pros a range of new capabilities including new media engine, more codecs, additional sampling rates, a new conferencing application, support for video conferencing, new fax capabilities, text message routing and more.

The most important new feature in Asterisk 10 is its wide-band media engine, according to a press release. According to the company, Digium has replaced Asterisk’s telephony-grade media engine with a more advanced one, providing support for studio-quality audio and a nearly unlimited number of codecs. Digium has also updated Asterisk’s media support for Asterisk 10, with several new codecs, including Skype’s (News - Alert) SILK codec, 32kHz Speex support and pass-through support for CELT.

“Asterisk 10 catapults the platform forward and future-proofs its media handling,” said Mark Spencer (News - Alert), Asterisk’s creator and Digium’s founder and chief technology officer. “Working with the open source community, we’ve added a wide range of capabilities that enable Asterisk to provide outstanding support for more types of media. Even 12 years after Asterisk’s release, Digium remains wholly committed to continuing to advance it as user preferences, community requirements and the technology landscape evolve.”

With the release of Asterisk version 10, Digium continues to advance Asterisk while at the same time working on the Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF). Asterisk SCF will allow developers to create real-time communications applications that include voice, video and text that meet the demands of a full range of uses, from embedded applications to enterprise and carrier solutions.

Stefanie Mosca is a Managing Editor for TMCnet, with a particular focus in wireless technologies as well as mobile and IP communications. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University and a bachelor's degree in communication from the University of New Haven. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page or follow her on Twitter (News - Alert) @stefaniemosca.

Edited by Tammy Wolf