Sipwise launched the 1st open-source VoIP platform: the Sip:providerCE!
We at Sipwise are excited to announce the first public release of the Sip:provider Community Edition or Sip:providerCE. It is a SIP based Class5 VoIP soft-switch, providing every component an operator needs to offer VoIP services. It comes as a communication platform leveraging the capabilities of Kamailio, SEMS and Asterisk, complemented by our own open-sourced building blocks to provide consistent and easy-to-use provisioning, billing and configuration maintenance. The different parts are carefully integrated with each other to form a fully featured VoIP soft-switch.
So what’s actually inside the Sip:providerCE?
The core of the Sip:providerCE is a SIP routeing engine set up on top of Kamailio, SEMS and Asterisk. On top of that, the Sipwise ossbss system serves as a middleware for the administrative web panel, the customer-self-care web panel and the SOAP and XMLRPC APIs, providing a consistent interface to provision the core components, so they can serve your SIP subscribers and peerings. All calls going through the platform are accounted and rated and can be exported to your invoicing system.
Have a look at the Feature List of the CE to get an idea of what you can expect from the platform.
What problems does the CE solve for you as an operator?
After a 15 minutes install, requiring only very few interaction from your side, the CE provides you with a turn-key open-source VoIP system.
Until today, when creating scalable and feature-rich VoIP platforms based on open-source software, you were forced to put together a lot of different software components in order to provide the services you had in mind. This required digging into the dark places of SIP, learning to configure Kamailio, SEMS and Asterisk. On top of that, you had to either build your own accounting/billing or route your calls through other software components, enabling you to get billing data. You had to build your customer web interfaces, integrate your provisioning workflow deeply into existing systems, reading/writing in all the different MySQL databases and tables, and badly breaking it when upgrading a single component. You had to wrap your own monitoring scripts around all the components to get an idea of the inner state of the system.
This era is over now because the pain points mentioned above are exactly what the Sip:provider CE is solving for you now. The software components are currently serving hundreds of thousands of commercial customers all over Europe, so it’s not like a new software project. We at Sipwise, however, thought that it’s time to release it to the public, so each and every operator doesn’t have to go through all these same hassles. SIP for telephony isn’t an innovation anymore, it’s common practice. So it’s time now to move on with other innovative features based on SIP, and with the CE we’re providing the foundation to get you kick-started with the basics.
And in which direction is the Sip:providerCE development going?
Today, we’re releasing the CE for the very first time, after working on the different building blocks for three years and putting it together for six months now. It might still have some rough edges, but we already have exciting plans for the next releases. Our vision is that the CE will get to a state, where you can put it in place and operate it like any other network router or network switch, without having to think a lot about all the complexity in VoIP. We think we’ve made a great step with this release already, but we definitely won’t stop here. Join the community behind the CE by subscribing to the spce-user Mailing-List, tinker with the different software components and tell us what you’d like to have changed or what you’d need to make your life even easier.
Stop talking, let’s get started
Ok, so head over to the sip:providerCE Quick-Install page and follow the instructions provided there. Subscribe to the mailing list or contact us for business support, and together we’ll get you off the ground with your VoIP system.
Have fun,
Andreas Granig
CTO, Sipwise