Asterisk 1.2.0-beta1 Released

The first beta of Asterisk 1.2.0 has been released! This version of Asterisk represents a significant improvement in features, stability and compatibility over the 1.0.x releases. Some of the major new (or upgraded) features include:

• Asterisk Realtime Architecture
• Asterisk Manager Interface
• Asterisk Extension Language
• Dialplan functions
• More powerful dialplan expression parser
• ...

google talk

so i get back from a short city trip to venice, with little or no broadband connectivity, only to find out that our friends at google just launched there own im/voip service: google talk. of course, that's great news. because finally there's a worthy contender to the, until now pretty dominant, skype service. even though it's still in beta, it looks pretty nice, supporting open standards such as xmpp (jabber) and in the future also sip, according to the developer faq. apparently skype has reacted, by "opening up" its platform.

for once, we'll let google point you to the news items that popped up everywhere.

VOIP shipments up 30% in Q3 2005

Taiwanese IP phone shipment volume for the enterprise market will hit about 850,000 units and one mln units in Q3 and Q4 2005 respectively, marking roughly 20% sequential growth in each quarter, according to Market Intelligence Center (MIC), an ICT industry research institute based in Taipei.
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This revival in shipment volume was caused by rebounding demand in the three main markets, including North America, Western Europe and Japan.

IAX protocol simplifies VoIP

One reason analog telephones are still around is that you can buy an inexpensive model, plug it in and begin making calls right away. When was the last time you were able to do that with a new IP phone? Most VoIP protocols are hard to configure in certain environments, making it difficult to get many new VoIP products working out of the box.

After Mark Spencer created Asterisk , the open source PBX, he started to see how this lack of simplicity could be a huge barrier to the VoIP market. In response, he created a new protocol called IAX