After a rather quiet v2.7 release right before Christmas 2012, we are excited to announce the general availability of sip:providerCE v2.8 and sip:providerPRO v2.8!

This release marks a another big milestone, because it’s the first Long Term Support (LTS) release of a sip:provider version. This means that we’re going to actively support and back-port bug fixes and security updates to v2.8 for the next three years and will move on to working on v3.0 over the next three months.

What’s the sip:provider platform?

sip:provider PRO Architecture Overview

The Sipwise sip:provider platform is a highly versatile open source based VoIP soft-switch for ISPs and ITSPs to serve large numbers of SIP subscribers. It leverages existing building blocks like Kamailio, Sems and Asterisk to create a feature-rich and high-performance system by glueing them together in a best-practice approach and implementing missing pieces on top of it.

Sipwise engineers have been working with Asterisk and Kamailio (and its predecessors SER and OpenSER) since 2004, and have roles on the management board of Kamailio and are contributing to these projects both in terms of patches and also financially by sponsoring development tasks. The sip:provider platform is available as a Community Edition (SPCE), which is fully free and open source, and as a commercial PRO appliance shipped turn-key in a high availability setup.

The SPCE provides secure and feature-rich voice and video communication to end customers (voice, video, instant messaging, presence, buddy lists, screen sharing, remote desktop control) and connect them to other SIP-, Mobile- or traditional PSTN-networks. It can therefore act as open Skype replacement system, traditional PSTN replacement, Over-The-Top (OTT) platform and also as a Session Border Controller in front of existing VoIP services in order to enable signaling encryption, IPv6 support, fraud- and Denial-of-Service prevention. Another use-case is to act as a Class4 SIP concentrator to bundle multiple SIP peerings for other VoIP services.

What’s new in v2.8?

There are a whole lot of new features, improvements and fixes since v2.7, here is an overview of the most important ones:

  • Web Panel and Provisioning Interface Enhancements:

    • Webfax interface to send faxes (plain text input form and tif/ps/pdf upload) directly from within the CSC Panel. (PRO only)
    • Show all collected statistics (instead of only a few selected ones) in the Admin Panel dashboard.
    • Set account-specific fraud limits per account in Admin Panel.
    • Set source pattern and fee direction for Billing Fees in the Admin Panel
    • Treat source and destination patterns as they are entered without wrapping some variants into regular expressions in the Admin Panel.
    • Improve Call-Forward language translations in CSC Panel.
    • Add Italian language translation in CSC Panel.
    • Add optional URL Parameter “?plain” like https://<ip>:2443/SOAP/Provisioning.wsdl?plain to SOAP URL to suppress inline documentation tags.
    • Add fraud and billing extensions mentioned above to SOAP and XMLRPC interfaces.
  • Billing and Fraud Enhancements:

    • Add “source” field to billing fees for source-based call rating.
    • Add “direction” field to billing fees for call termination rating (e.g. to bill calls to 800 numbers to the called party).
    • Be more relaxed in rate-o-mat in regards to missing provider ids.
    • Add daily fraud limit to billing profiles.
    • Allow to override daily and monthly fraud limits per account.
    • Split cost related fields in CDRs into source- and destination-fields.
    • Export CDRs based on export_status field instead of CDR ids for selective re-exporting.
  • Signaling and Media Enhancements:

    • Add user/domain-preference to selectively allow calls to foreign domains.
    • Implement new dictionary-based control protocol (based on bencode) in new Kamailio rtpproxy-ng module and mediaproxy-ng to pass full SDP informations between Kamailio and mediaproxy-ng.
    • Implement STUN and ICE support in mediaproxy-ng.
    • Selectively control ICE/ICE-breaking via user/domain/peer-preferences for interconnecting ICE and non-ICE clients.
    • Improve outbound-socket handling to force calls to peers via non-default sockets.
    • Selectively control NAT pinging via user/domain-preferences.
    • Rework local domain checks for peers to make adding the own IP address as dummy domain obsolete.
    • Fix 3xx redirect handling in regards to rewrite rules and billing.
    • Fix late-offer-answer handling in re-INVITEs.
    • Add whitelist option to config.yml for disabling far-end NAT handling of certain IPs.

How do I test-drive the new version?

As usual, we’re providing both a VMWare Image and a Virtualbox Image for quick evaluation testing. Check the relevant section in the Handbook for detailed instructions.

How do I install the new version or upgrade from an older one?

For new users, please follow the Installation Instructions in the Handbook to set up the SPCE v2.8 from scratch.

For users of the SPCE v2.7, please follow the upgrade procedure outlined in the Handbook. If you have customized your configurations using customtt.tt2 files, you must migrate your changes to the new configuration files after the upgrade, otherwise all your calls will most certainly fail.

How can I get notifications of new packages in v2.8?

Since we regularly push bug fixes into the v2.8 repo over the next three years, it’s important for you to know when updates are available. Therefore, starting with today we automatically send notification emails to our SPCE-User Mailing-List. If you’re not subscribed yet, please do so at lists.sipwise.com/listinfo/spce-user.

How can I contribute to the project?

Over the last months we’ve started to publish our software components at github.com/sipwise. This is still an on-going effort, which is done on a component-per-component basis. Please check back regularly for new projects to appear there, and feel free to fork them and send us pull requests. For development related questions, please subscribe to our SPCE-Dev Mailing-List at lists.sipwise.com/listinfo/spce-dev.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank our PRO customers and the SPCE community for their feedback, bug reports and feature suggestions to make this release happen. We hope you enjoy using the v2.8 release and keep your input coming. A big thank you also to all the developers of Kamailio and Sems, who make it possible for us to provide an innovative and future-proof SIP engine as the core of our platform! And last but not least a HUGE thank you to the Sipwise development team, who worked insanely hard to create this release. You are awesome!