Internet News recently reported on the latest Asterisk news. In a keynote session at the Asterisk and Open Telephony Conference in Toronto, Kevin Fleming, senior software engineer at Digium and co-maintainer of Asterisk, announced he is now concentrating his efforts on the 1.6 release, which could be out by the end of this year.

In terms of actual new features that will land in the upcoming 1.6 Asterisk, Fleming highlighted additional Call Bridging functionality as a key deliverable. The goal for 1.6 is to provide flexible multi-channel bridging such that channels that can be added and dropped so calls can instantly be converted from two party to multi-party. That functionality will enable the use of advance features, such as in call announcements and call center monitoring, by a third party.

Improved call handling capacity and performance is also set for the 1.6 release. Fleming explained that the idea is to reduce the thread/memory footprint for handling large numbers of media streams. Initial tests already show a 100 to 200 percent improvement in the number of streams that a server can handle.

Support for asynchronous events will also appear in 1.6, enabling modules in Asterisk to communicate with each other across a cluster. Fleming told the audience that, with current Asterisk versions, voice mail needs to be on the same server as your call is on in order for call notification to actually work.

Better reporting through a new call event logging capability in Asterisk 1.6 will allow complete tracking of events that take place during a call. The goal, according to Fleming, is to provide more detail than traditional CDR (Call Detail Recording) features offer and to allow for more granular tracking and auditing.

Fleming also reported on the latest 1.4, as well as a new Asterisk appliance effort called AsteriskNOW. He also boasted that Asterisk developers have overhauled how they deal with security issues. Security issues are now handled by a core team within 24 to 48 hours from the initial report. There is now also a formal Asterisk Project Security Advisory reporting system that will provide full disclosure into reported issues and what Asterisk is doing to fix issues.

In addition to the improved security vulnerabilities, Fleming said that the Asterisk community is working on an effort called Asterisk Network Edge, which will enable an Asterisk deployment to better integrate with security devices such as firewalls.

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