HUNTSVILLE, Ala., October 3, 2017 – Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk Company, today at its annual AstriCon users and developers conference, announced Asterisk 15, the next major release of the world’s most popular open source communications platform.
Asterisk is well known as the standard in open source audio communications and features an expansive ecosystem and installed base. Asterisk 15 extends the power of Asterisk by adding enhanced multi-party video conferencing and collaboration capabilities. With Asterisk 15, business application developers can now create custom audio and video communication solutions within one platform, bridging the gap between modern web-based communications and legacy telephony solutions.
“Today’s communications environment is changing. Businesses need to communicate with more than audio; they want video conferencing and collaboration as well,” said Matthew Fredrickson, project lead for Asterisk with Digium. “Asterisk has always been the ideal developer toolkit for building audio conferencing solutions that cross the chasm between telephony protocols. Asterisk 15 now adds enhanced video conferencing and screen sharing capabilities with WebRTC-capable endpoints, eliminating the need to integrate additional technology solely for video. This simplifies the communications infrastructure, reducing the need to implement and support multiple independent applications.”
Asterisk 15 adds multi-party selective forwarding unit (SFU) video conferencing to ConfBridge, Asterisk’s existing, full-featured audio conferencing application. This enables users to connect standard WebRTC clients to Asterisk for multi-party video conferences. By taking advantage of this new technology, these conferences can seamlessly integrate WebRTC clients, IoT connected SIP video endpoints, and other audio-only participants who are connecting using traditional communications technologies.
To support the new SFU functionality, Asterisk’s internal architecture has been significantly upgraded to utilize three new WebRTC technologies: RTCP Multiplexing, BUNDLE and Unified Plan. These technologies represent the latest in real-time communications and serve two very important functions that are lacking in other solutions. RTCP Multiplexing and BUNDLE allow audio and video to easily traverse NAT routers and firewalls, solving some of the most complex and frustrating issues faced during installation. Asterisk 15 is one of the first technology platforms to adopt Unified Plan, the latest IETF proposal supported by Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and others for signaling multiple media sessions in Session Description Protocol (SDP). This choice ensures current and future interoperability with endpoints from major industry players.
Asterisk 15 is now available for download from the Asterisk web site. To see a live demonstration of the new multi-party video functionality, tune into the AstriCon live stream channel on Thursday, October 5, 2017, at 3:45 p.m. EDT. For more information, documentation and usage samples, as well as a complete list of new features, changes and upgrade notes, visit the Asterisk 15 Documentation Pages on the Asterisk wiki. To interact directly with the Asterisk community, visit the Community Forums today
