A big release of Asterisk, the open source PBX software platform, was announced last week, creating some buzz in the industry. “’Asterisk 1.8 is the first Long Term Support release since version 1.4,’ said Russell Bryant, Digium's lead Asterisk developer. ‘It includes hundreds of enhancements, many of which will help community members building large-scale solutions,’” quotes Financial Tech Spotlight.
For those who are unfamiliar with the term Long Term Support (LTS), it generally means a stable distribution of software that will be maintained by the company (security updates, hardware compatibility) until the next LTS version is released. The last LTS version of Asterisk, version 1.4, was released in 2006 (Source). On Digium’s Asterisk 1.8 release announcement, they highlight a few items from over 200 enhancements:
- Secure RTP
- IPv6 Support in the SIP channel driver
- Connected Party Identification Support
- Calendaring Integration
- A new call logging system, Channel Event Logging (CEL)
- Distributed Device State using Jabber/XMPP PubSub
- Call Completion Supplementary Services support
- Advice of Charge support
- Much, much more!
Interestingly, they do not mention in this abbreviated list the added support for Google Voice, despite that "Google Voice support" is the feature that’s headlining in several articles online. Just what has been added for Google Voice Support?
The addition is actually Jingle support within Asterisk 1.8. Asterisk now communicates with Google Talk using Jingle protocol. Jingle is "an extension to the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). It implements peer-to-peer (P2P) session control (signaling) for multimedia interactions such as in voice over IP (VoIP) or videoconferencing communications. It was designed by Google and the XMPP Standards Foundation.”
On the surface, this means that you can map your Asterisk PBX extensions to Google Voice numbers. And, you can use your Google account to make outbound calls through the Asterisk PBX. Calls over this set-up would not run through your SIP trunks, but instead through Jingle (XMPP). At the moment, inbound and outbound calls through Google Voice are free. Of course, Google can change that when they please. (Here is a helpful Digium forum on this if you have questions.)
The Asterisk support for Jingle is certainly an interesting move, and one that Asterisk pro’s can jump on to take advantage of Google Voice free calling. It is unclear, though, as to whether Google Voice will maintain free/cheap calling as a long-term business venture. Thus, I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest headline for Asterisk 1.8, which is probably why it hasn’t made the short list of features described in the release. When, and if, Google adds native SIP support, that will be a headliner!