We are excited to announce the general availability of sip:providerCE mr5.5.4 and sip:providerPRO mr5.5.4.

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, file transfer, 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 mr5.5.4?

The most important changes for mr5.5.4 compared to mr5.4 are:

  • Upgrade Debian from Debian 8 (jessie) to Debian 9 (stretch). SysV is still the init system in use. [TT#21905]
  • Migration from MariaDB 10.0 to MariaDB 10.1 [TT#21824]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Upgrade GlusterFS from 3.8.4 to 3.12.1 [TT#21896]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Remove now unused ngcp-glusterfs-config package. [TT#23433]
  • The monitoring backend has been migrated away completely from Redis to InfluxDB [TT#18250]
  • [PRO/Carrier] ngcp-collective-check will now check the free swap space. [TT#22752]
  • [PRO/Carrier] The ngcp-snmp-agent supports logging to syslog. [TT#21756]
  • Add ability to configure supported SSL protocols/ciphers in config.yml [TT#12195]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Discontinued and removed sems-app and sems-ha (sems-pbx takes over their tasks) [TT#22069] [TT#22070]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Presence event as-feature-event is now supported in kamailio with optional CloudPBX module [TT#18851]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Extension dialing within Auto-Attendant is now possible with CloudPBX module [TT#18736]
  • Implemented request and response processing runtime logging in proxy [TT#22659]
  • Updated asterisk to 13.14.1 [TT#20081]
  • Updated kamailio to 4.4.6 [TT#18950
  • [PRO/Carrier] Add support for the new HTTP/2 and JWT based protocol for sending push messages to Apple/iOS devices (APNs) [TT#14952]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Add license management and enforcement system [TT#23200]
  • Optionally send anonymous usage statistics [TT#23200]
  • Improved NGCP Panel UI and the API performance [TT#22827]
  • Added partitioning support for accounting.cdr [TT#3668]
  • Optimised performance, addressed several minor issues and introduced partitioning support in the acc-cleanup tool [TT#3668]
  • Added a “Manager Secretary” feature, currently only supports Polycom phones [TT#20302]
  • libmyodbc is no longer supported in Debian and replaced by the MariaDB odbc connector library [TT#21307]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Added Polycom phones provisioning support [TT#7515]
  • [PRO/Carrier] Improved Yealink phones provisioning support [TT#18335]

See the list of all changes in PDF: Changelog mr5.5.4

Is mr5.5 LTS (long time supported) release?

Yes, the release mr5.5 is official LTS release. It will be supported till Oct 31, 2020. See release calendar on https://www.sipwise.com/releases/

Is it possible to upgrade directly from mr4.5* LTS to mr5.5* LTS release?

Yes, it is possible to upgrade directly for all CE/PRO and Carrier products.

Is it possible to upgrade directly from mr3.8* LTS to mr5.5* LTS release?

No, it is not possible. It is not allowed to jump over LTS releases. Upgrade from mr3.8 LTS must be performed on the latest build of release mr4.5 LTS first.

How do I test-drive the new version?

As usual, we’re providing a VMWare Image, a Virtualbox Image and a Vagrant Box for quick evaluation testing. For those of you using Amazon Cloud we provide the EC2 AMIs in the following regions:

  • AMI ID for region us-east-1: ami-054f970e90712851b
  • AMI ID for region us-west-2: ami-04ecc1b133787c9a2
  • AMI ID for region us-west-1: ami-0c2767f3d0005292f
  • AMI ID for region eu-central-1: ami-0e5c4cdcc67701e90
  • AMI ID for region eu-west-1: ami-0c5206afbb8c6402d
  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-1: ami-01b0172e7f2deb5a1
  • AMI ID for region ap-southeast-2: ami-04b9ae3a46158eba4
  • AMI ID for region ap-northeast-1: ami-063cb92cac9340feb
  • AMI ID for region sa-east-1: ami-053c8adab17fe43fd

Check the relevant section in SPCE 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 mr5.5.4 from scratch.

For the users of the previous version of the SPCE, 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 contribute to the project?

Sipwise is publishing software components at github.com/sipwise. Please check it 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/Carrier customers and the SPCE community for their feedback, bug reports and feature suggestions to make this release happen. We hope you enjoy using our software and keep your input coming. A big thank you also to all the developers of Kamailio, Sems and Prosody, who make it possible for us to provide an innovative and future-proof SIP/XMPP 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!