Asterisk 11 Comes with Long-Term Support, Can Replace Expensive PBX Systems

This week, Digium and the Asterisk Development Team announced the release of Asterisk 11. Asterisk 11 is available for immediate download from the Asterisk.org website. If you're unfamiliar with Asterisk, it's an open source telephony switching and private branch exchange service that replaces expensive and inflexible PBX systems in many organizations.  Asterisk's telephony system includes call waiting, hold and transfer, caller ID, and other useful tools so it's especially popular at small businesses that need to watch costs.

The new version 11 is a Long Term Support release (LTS), like the 1.8 release that arrived two years ago, and it comes with four years of support. Here are more details on this powerful open source telephony platform.

Internet News notes:

"Asterisk 11 offers some pretty interesting new capabilities. At the top of the list is support for WebRTC which delivers WebSockets SIP transport. Basically what this will enable is for web browsers (hurray Firefox!) to directly access Asterisk on the backend to place calls. That's a huge opportunity for the web as a whole and I can imagine all kinds of innovative use case models will emerge for this technology."

"WebRTC sessions will be secured with DTLS-SRTP, which is another new feature in Asterisk 11. The browser based sessions will also be supported with ICE, STUN and TURN – basically a set of technologies for tunneling media streams for WebRTC."

We've covered Asterisk on numerous occasions, including an in-depth piece found here. With its "Asterisk: The Future of Telephony", O'Reilly offers an excellent PDF-based guide to the platform. It's a complete book on the platform, and it's free.

And, by the way, if you're concerned about Asterisk being too technical for you, Digium offers an easy-to-use telephony system called Switchvox that is based on Asterisk but doesn't require you to know Linux. It's available down the left rail on this page.