Sangoma Announces Asterisk 19 and FreePBX 16
The 18th annual conference will be held virtually November 3-4
MARKHAM, ONTARIO, November 2, 2021 – Sangoma Technologies Corporation (“Sangoma”) (TSXV: STC), an industry leader in delivering cloud-native Communications-as-a-Service solutions for businesses of all sizes, today announced the release of Asterisk 19, the next major release of the open-source framework for building communications applications, and FreePBX 16, the most widely-used open-source IP PBX in the world.
“We are incredibly excited to release major new versions of Asterisk 19 and FreePBX 16,” said Nenad Corbic, Chief Technology Officer at Sangoma. “This was a huge effort by both the Sangoma team and the open-source community. I would like to thank and congratulate everyone who helped make Asterisk 19 and FreePBX 16 possible!”
Asterisk is the recognized standard in open-source audio communications, featuring a wide ecosystem and large installed base. Asterisk 19 builds upon its implementation of STIR/SHAKEN, the technology that fights against caller ID spoofing on public telephone networks and unwanted robocalls, already introduced in the previous major release.
Release 19 also brings work towards a new approach to using Speech to Text services by external providers, as well as RTCP and PJSIP Transport improvements, among other miscellaneous features and bug fixes. With the aim to keep the community timely informed about upcoming changes, a new Module Deprecation Policy has been set in place.
“I’m extremely pleased to see this new major release of Asterisk, Asterisk 19! Asterisk 19 has seen significant focus on continued regulatory compliance related work, such as STIR/SHAKEN, focus on improving the quality of the video experience, as well as work on foundations for better speech recognition provider integration,” commented Matthew Fredrickson, Director of Open-Source Software Engineering at Sangoma. “It has been a busy year in the world of Asterisk but despite the busyness the team has worked hard to deliver. Many thanks to the team at Sangoma as well as all the open-source contributors for coming together to make this happen.”
FreePBX is a fully featured phone system with a high level of flexibility that allows it to be tailored according to business needs. FreePBX 16 brings support for PHP 7.4, customization options for UCP (User Control Panel), and key security features, including a complete overhaul of the firewall module and more settings for network protocols.
These releases highlight Sangoma’s continued commitment to support Open Source and the community. As Lorne Gaetz, Director of the Open-Source Community, states: “Asterisk 19 and FreePBX 16 each represent an enormous effort from the Engineering / QA teams, and also from numerous individual contributions from the Open Source communities throughout the development and beta periods. Congratulations all around for these milestones, and on behalf of all who benefit from these projects, I offer a sincere thank you to anyone and everyone who’s contributed to these major releases and to those who contribute generally to the success of Open Source.”
AstriCon is scheduled this year to be held virtually on November 3rd – 4th, including discussions on STIR/SHAKEN, Kamailio, Kubernetes, Security, 911, and the most recent updates to Asterisk & FreePBX. The livestream of the event will be available at https://www.asterisk.org with live Q&A following each presentation.
Both Asterisk 19 and FreePBX are now available for download from the Asterisk and FreePBX web sites respectively. For more information, documentation, and usage samples, as well as a complete list of new features, changes and upgrade notes, visit the Asterisk 19 and FreePBX 16 Documentation Pages on the project’s wiki. To interact directly with the community, visit the Community Forums today.