[asterisk-users] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEW CHANNEL DRIVER FOR ASTERISK RELEASED TODAY

[Olle E. Johansson]

* NEW CHANNEL DRIVER FOR ASTERISK 1.6 AND VOXSWITCH 3 ADDS AUDIO AND  
VIDEO TO MICROBLOGGING!

In a surprising move, Digium in partnership with Edvina today released  
a new channel driver for Asterisk, chan_tweet. The driver connects  
seamlessly to several microblogging platforms, including Twitter,  
Facebook, Laconi.ca/Identi.ca and GSM text/SMS. The main feature of  
this new module is to add audio and video capabilities to  
microblogging, making the popular microblogging networks a new  
platform for VoIP and IP realtime communication.

- "I have seen that the microblogging solutions building on the social  
network infrastructure have had enourmous unexploited capabilities",  
says Mill Biller at Digium, "I've used it for a long time both  
personally and for the company and we realized early that by adding  
IAX2 support, we could now take these platforms one giant leap forward  
by adding realtime multimedia. I can now spend evenings chit-chatting  
in audio and HD-resolution video with all my audience around the world  
instead of sending short text messages. It's truly awsome!"

Digium contracted Edvina in Sweden, a well-known company in the  
Asterisk community and long-term Digium business partner, to build  
this solution. Edvina has many years of experience in building large- 
scale IAX2 networks, as well as doing development on the IAX2 support  
in Asterisk.

- "IAX2 recently was published in an IETF RFC and we're pushing it  
heavily in all VoIP forums." says Olle Johansson of Edvina, "We're  
hoping that the IAX2FORUM will get a lot of new members that are  
willing to adopt this technology for their intranets, microblogging  
services and VoIP infrastructures. In the coming month, we will  
present more information about new partners with more than 100K users  
that are going to switch from old technologies, like Hype, SIP and H. 
323. All of these protocols failed, either because they where  
proprietary or simply became too complex. SIP currently has more than  
5.000 pages of documents describing all the features of the protocol  
and there's no single implementation of all of these to test with.  
Considering the protocol being over 10 years old, this is a sad story."

- "We've done our best to fix the Asterisk SIP channel support for  
customers, but the customer base has been shrinking as more and more  
converted their networks to IAX2 and now, there's simply no one  
interested in us doing that work. We've stated over and over again  
that the SIP channel in Asterisk is broken and no one can prove us  
right or wrong, because the protocol is just too complex."

* The Microblogmedia platform
------------------------------------------
The Microblogmedia(TM) platform, developed by Digium and Edvina, let's  
users use any microblogging network to set up multimedia sessions. By  
compressing an IAX2 call setup event in the microblog message, web  
browsers and clients will connect automatically peer-2-peer if  
possible, or through the MicroBlogMediaRelay network that supports  
seamless NAT and firewall traversal by using automatic IPv6 tunnels.

Asterisk 1.6.3, released later this month, will support this feature  
in the IAX2, H.323 and maybe in the old SIP channel (that is now  
marked deprecated). There is work on adding this feature to ISDN  
calls, by using messages in the D-channel for tunneling the IAX2 call  
setup messages. Digium's VoxSwitch will support this feature in the  
next release, planned for q3 2009.

* Ending the Hype project
-----------------------------------
In the same press release, Sock Stevens, product manager at Digium  
finally acknowledged that the Hype channel driver that was launched at  
Astricon 2008 will not be released after all.
- "We found only one partner to test interoperability with, and that's  
not enough to make sure the channel driver being compatible with the  
protocol. And the protocol wasn't published in any RFC at all, or any  
other document. So we finally gave up. We're now dedicating resources  
for the new chan_tweet project and enhancing presence support in our  
IAX2 solution. With the installed base of IAX2 and the new  
MicroBlogMedia platform, this will be an even more impressive  
solution, reaching millions of IAX2 users in the enterprise as well as  
public sector and homes."

* Technichal factoids
----------------------------
- chan_tweet is the result of the project labelled "Codename  
orangepeel" amongst the development team and builds on the new  
"Pinemango" architecture. This is the first channel driver not  
connecting directly to the Asterisk core, but to the Pinemango API  
over Adversion, the Ruby framework developed by Phil Jaysip.
- The MicroBlogMediaRelay IAX2 platform is an open distributed network  
that builds on IPv6 and a facebook application, thus using the  
enormous bandwidth provided for free by the Facebook(TM) platform
- chan_tweet will be released with the core module in Open Source, but  
with a license exception for plugin developers to add proprietary  
modules, like the Wireless Village plugin provided by the 3GPP project  
and the Unistim Microblog Solution by Nertol Networks.

For more information, please do not contact Digium sales.

To be released: 2009-04-01