FreeSWITCH Advances “Free” Speech With 1.0.6 Release

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Latest FreeSWITCH release adds new codecs and features,
advances open source telephony.

The FreeSWITCH team is proud to announce the official release of
version 1.0.6, the latest release of the popular open source
soft-switch library. FreeSWITCH 1.0.6 builds upon previous
FreeSWITCH releases and brings dozens of new features and scores of
enhancements in codecs, SIP processing, CPU utilization, TDM
hardware support, and more. In the eight months since the release
of FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, the core developers and key contributors have
made improvements in almost all areas of the project.

New Audio Codecs

Two key additions to FreeSWITCH are the SILK and BroadVoice audio
codecs, both of which have recently been released in open source
fashion. The BroadVoice family of codecs, supplied by Broadcom
Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), were recently released under the GNU
Lesser General Public License (LGPL) on a royalty-free basis. The
SILK codec, created and used by Skype, has been released for
developers to use in non-commercial applications, such as interop
testing. These new codecs augment the impressive list of free
codecs now supported by FreeSWITCH. By supporting such a wide array
of free codecs, FreeSWITCH enables truly “free” speech in the VoIP
world.
These codecs were added with relative ease, highlighting the value
of FreeSWITCH’s modular architecture. “It only took about 90
minutes to add the SILK codec to FreeSWITCH,” reports Brian K.
West, one of the core FreeSWITCH developers. “It was very
gratifying to be making SILK calls with FreeSWITCH on the very same
day that Skype released the SILK source code.” Easily adding new
codecs is also valuable for testing. The FreeSWITCH developers
found an issue with one of the BroadVoice codecs and immediately
reported it to the Broadcom engineers, who were able to resolve it
quickly.
Another important codec addition is G.729. Although G.729 is not
“free” like many of the other codecs, it is both widely used and
reasonably priced. FreeSWITCH previously supported G.729 in
“passthrough” mode only. Our users will now be able to transcode to
and from G.729 with new commercial G.729 licenses.

New Features

A major new feature in 1.0.6 is support for the Broadsoft method of
performing Shared Call Appearance (SCA) in a VoIP environment. The
Broadsoft SCA method is known to work with Polycom, Snom, Cisco SPA
(Small Business Pro 500 Series), and Aastra phones among others.
The FreeSWITCH team spent many hours testing this feature on
numerous telephones and in various calling scenarios. Anyone who
has dealt with SCA knows what a challenge it is just to get phones
from a single vendor working, so you can appreciate the effort
needed to make this feature work across phones from multiple
vendors. Using this method of SCA you can have one shared line
appear on Polycom, Cisco, Aastra, and Snom phones at the same time.
SCA is enabled by setting the “manage-shared-appearance” parameter
on the SIP profile and turning on SCA in the telephone
configuration.
The latest version of FreeSWITCH includes many new features that
allow for advanced call processing. The new “valet_park” dialplan
application allows for greater control and flexibility in how calls
are parked and retrieved. The valet allows the operator to specify
a location where the call is parked for later retrieval from any
phone. The new “valet_park” supports both manual and automatic
assigning of park locations for calls. Another feature for call
handling is “campon.” The “campon” feature is similar to call
waiting where a phone in use can receive a second call. If the
called party does not answer then the call can forward to voicemail
or another extension. There is also a new “fifo_position” channel
variable to allow an administrator to see the position in queue for
each caller waiting to be answered. The playback dialplan
application has been enhanced to allow playback to start at a
random point in the target sound file by appending “@@