We are excited to announce the general availability of sip:providerCE v3.0 and sip:providerPRO v3.0, a new major release with cutting edge features which is maintained in parallel to our v2.8 LTS release!

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 v3.0?

There are a whole lot of new features and improvements since v2.8, here is an overview of the most important ones:

  • New Debian OS Version

    • Upgrade to latest stable Debian Wheezy (7.0).
    • Upgrade of MySQL to 5.5.
    • Upgrade of Kamailio to 4.0.2.
    • Upgrade of all system dependencies to the latest stable version.
  • Full Multi-Tenancy

    • Organize your system into Resellers.
    • Resellers can maintain their own Domains, Billing Profiles, Customers, Subscribers etc.
    • Export CDRs per Reseller.
  • New Admin/Reseller Panel

    • Fluid Web Panel based on Bootstrap.
    • Completely CSS theme-able.
    • Support for both Admins and Resellers.
    • Asynchronous data handling for efficiently handling large data sets.
    • Any delete or terminate operation now needs user confirmation to prevent accidental data loss.
  • XMPP Support

    • The Prosody XMPP server is installed on the system.
    • Unified customer base for both SIP and XMPP.
    • Search XMPP users via their phone numbers using the system rewrite rules.
    • Full support for virtual hosts like with SIP.
    • CUSAX support with auto-provisioning for the Jitsi client for seamlessly running SIP and XMPP side-by-side.
  • WebRTC Support

    • The SIP load-balancer has SIP-over-Websockets enabled.
    • The Sipwise mediaproxy-ng can transcode RTP/SAVPF profiles used in WebRTC to RTP/AVP and vice versa.
    • The system can act as a WebRTC to plain SIP gateway for audio to terminate calls to PSTN and vice versa.
  • SRTP Transcoding

    • The Sipwise mediaproxy-ng now supports a high-performance kernel-based SRTP transcoding mechanism.
  • Internal Enhancements

    • Kamailio uses a LUA preference framework for dynamically loading usr/dom/peer-preferences. This makes the config file much easier to read.
    • We introduced an automated SIP test framework for testing all call scenarios.

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.

Should I upgrade to 3.0?

If you have very strong requirements on running a rock-solid system, you should probably stay/install our v2.8 LTS version, because there are plenty of cutting edge features and lots of changes in 3.0.

However, if you need any of the features listed above, you should definitely install/upgrade to 3.0.

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 v3.0 from scratch.

For users of the SPCE v2.8, 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?

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 v3.0 release 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!