Here’s some highlighted new features in Asterisk 1.8:

• Secure real-time transport protocol (RTP) support—New end-to-end VoIP encryption of signaling and media to compliment the existing encrypted signaling support.
  Steve explained SRTP support will be huge since it will allow for government and financial deployments of the Asterisk platform.
• Security event framework—Modular capability for collecting and distributing security events within Asterisk.
• Extensive additions to ISDN-BRI functionality—Call completion services, connected party identification, ETSI advice of charge (AOC), message waiting indicator (MWI), call rerouting and call deflection.
• Session initiation protocol (SIP) changes—Substantial increase in the speed of registrations, transport layer security (TLS) improvements and more flexible network address translation (NAT) handling.
• IPv6 support—Although IPv6 has a slow uptake in the enterprise, at the carrier core, IPv6 is progressing very quickly. Steve mentioned that could be the initial place where IPv6 can be leveraged on the Asterisk platform. He said, “I suspect initially you’ll see it in the carrier and cable deployments. In fact, we have support now for PacketCable NCS built into Asterisk as well, so those two goes nicely hand-in-hand. There are a lot of cable providers that are rolling out IPV6 for all the set top boxes and other devices that are attached to their network.” He added, “The other area IPv6 is big is Asia. There is a lot of IP underruns in Asia where there is billions of people with billions of devices. So it’s really caught on there. In a lot of ways that has been a gating factor for Asterisk deployments in Asia. But now that IPv6 is there, we’re expecting an even larger percentage of adoption.”
• Calendar integration—Support for Microsoft Exchange, CalDav and iCalendar. This is a pretty cool feature. If for instance your Calendar has you listed as in a meeting, Asterisk can automatically send the caller to your voicemail. Or if you are marked as ‘or Out of Office’ Asterisk can automatically forward to your cell phone.
• Channel event logging (CEL)—Enhanced call tracking and logging for better audit trail and billing purposes.
• XMPP distributed messaging—Better scalability for message waiting and device state.
• Improved internationalization and localization—Asterisk offers improved handling of concatenated audio playback (dates, numbers).
• Google Talk and Google Voice support—Inbound and outbound support for Google Talk and Google Voice calling. Google is serious about voice. Google is offering a free DID and free calling until the end of 2010 via Google Talk. So with the Google Talk integration, you essentially have a FREE trunk to make free calling on your Asterisk PBX. Take that Skype Connect!
• High-resolution timestamps for call data records (CDR)—Carrier and enterprise users can track call times to the microsecond.
• Better support for voice codecs—16 kHz signed linear media streams are now supported. Additional HD voice codecs supported. Siren 7 and Siren 14 codecs from Polycom are also now supported
• PacketCable NCS 1.0 support—Allows cable companies to use Asterisk as an option to create business services.
• Default de-noise for conference bridge calls—Conference calls will sound clearer.
• ConfBridge application enhancements—DAHDI hardware is no longer required to use this software feature. New call conferencing application that does not require the DAHDI kernel interface to operate.
• Pitch shift functions—The pitch of audio, including of callers’ voices, can be manipulated.
• Multicast RTP paging—Extremely efficient and scalable method for handset paging. Instead of sending an INVITE to 50 IP phones, you can leverage multicast to send a broadcast to the IP phones. Steve said Polycom, snom, and he said he thought Aastra phones supported this multicast feature. Multicast means a little more work for your switches and routers, but much less stress on the Asterisk server than the traditional way.
• Faster development and more robust unit testing—Digium has implemented Agile development and a new automated testing framework. The Agile process streamlines development and gives Asterisk users a better view into development plans.

We are looking for Asterisk Developer to work for one of our Architel Labs businesses, SevenLayer; you will be responsible for leading development of the next generation of VoIP applications and features. As a member of the development team, you’ll be involved in all stages of the software development cycle, with particular focus on design and architecture.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• College or University degree.

• Excellent understanding of VoIP telephony with a particular focus on SIP and the related protocols and standards.

• 2 years of hands-on experience with Open-Source VoIP Platforms Asterisk and Freeswitch, SipX, OpenSER, etc.

• Experience in troubleshooting and fine-tuning of data networks for VoIP using wireshark, tcpdump, ngrep, etc.

• Significant experience with Linux, including administration and optimization of high performance server-type applications. Also should have experience with maintaining a Subversion code repository to support the complete software development process.

• 5 year experience in programming in Linux environments, using any number of the following: Perl, C, C++, Python, AWK, Bash, etc.

• Good analytical and troubleshooting skills.

• Excellent written and verbal communications.

Assets:

• Familiar with .Net Architecture, Web Services using SOAP, and experience with building database applications MySQL, MSQL, PostgreSQL etc

• Solid understanding of web-based architectures and programming, including data-driven e-commerce websites.

• Demonstrable history of technical leadership driving small development teams to deliver high quality software on time and on budget.

• Experience with call-processing architectures, including event-driven finite state machine(FSM) and multi-threading programming techniques.

• A portfolio of previous telephony projects you’ve been a part of, we would love to see a demo of them.

• Project organizational skills.

What We Offer

• How about the opportunity to join a fast-growing company and be part of a fun and dynamic team. You will be working directly with some of the best professionals in the world.

How to apply:

Please send your resume and cover letter to jdonica@architel.com. In your cover letter please reference the position you are applying for and provide a short introduction on why you believe you would be a good fit for the position.

To that end, more and more of our clients have been working with Jeff Rothell and his team at SevenLayer (an Architel Labs graduate) to ensure their telecom circuits meet their technology needs. For many North Texas businesses it is possible install 100Mbps (71 times faster than a T1) for less than $2,000 per month (not much more than many are spending for T1s today). In other cases it is possible to double or quadruple bandwidth for just a few hundred dollars per month. Of course location is key to acquisition of affordable bandwidth. When we began looking for a new location for our Network Operations Center, access to fiber (fiber connected to competitive bandwidth providers) was key. Our needs are in the gigabyte speed range (primarily due to our need to connect to our clients at 100Mbps speeds). Our new facility has fiber from various providers making it a perfect location for high-bandwidth needs.

SevenLayer - Intelligence Voice Cloud

Or at least that is what the folks at SevenLayer think. SevenLayer is latest company to be incubated in Architel Labs. Headed by Jeff Rothell, the company delivers cloud based voice applications to small and medium sized companies. Prior to co-founding Sevenlayer, Jeff built two multi-million dollar telecommunication companies. From 1999 to 2002 he served as President and CEO of Netvoice Technologies, a publicly traded (NTVT) telecommunications business operating hosted VoIP services in 52 major U.S. markets. Then in 2003 he co-founded CentricVoice, a venture-backed telecommunications company offering trunk replacement to small and medium sized businesses. Most recently Jeff served as COO of Unified360, one of the largest Cisco-powered voice vendors in the Southwest.

In the United States there are thousands of phone vendors selling hardware-based phone systems to small and medium-sized companies. Despite the advent of hosted voice options, the number of phone systems sold in the U.S. continues to increase. Business owners throughout the U.S. seem to want to own the hardware powering their phones. On the other hand they want ALL of the features that hosted solutions can offer at affordable prices. SevenLayer’s offering is designed to create a recurring revenue model for phone vendors, while offering business owners the features they demand without competing with their primary offering – selling phone systems.

Last month, SevenLayer launched what they call their Intelligent Voice Cloud, powered by their AVAS platform, and began offering live features including:

• Recording – a key application for call centers, financial services, healthcare and real estate. Formerly an expensive feature to acquire much less manage, can be offered as an add on service delivered from the cloud with no heavy upfront costs to implement, while making tracking, management and storage of recordings easy and secure.
• Conferencing – moving conferencing to the cloud may seem excessive, but in doing so an enterprise can leverage the power of our IVC conference scheduler allowing easy access to your address book. Imagine being able to schedule a meeting at a specific time and instead of having to remember to dial in, the IVC will dial each party at the appropriate time.
• Business Continuity – the greatest weakness of premises based features is the premises itself. In the event of a service disruption the cloud-based IVC can guarantee 100% uptime on inbound calls by automatically re-routing calls to alternative landlines or mobile numbers.

In the coming months SevenLayer will release a full suite of features and applications accessible to any small business through the click of a mouse.