What's New in Asterisk 1.6?

Most of the changes in Asterisk 1.6 are enhancement changes that improve the reliability and scalability of Asterisk. The new features of Asterisk 1.6 are:

• New Bridge feature: In this release, a new Bridge action has been created, which allows a user to connect two existing channels. This functionality will enable the use of advanced features such as in-call announcements and call center monitoring, by a third party.
• Improved NAT support and support for STUN: This provides improved connectivity capability with phones located behind a router or firewall.
• Improved reporting: A new call event logging capability was developed to give a more complete tracking of events that take place during a call. This will provide more details than traditional CDR (Call Detail Recording) and allow more granular tracking and auditing.
• Support for asynchronous events: This enables modules in Asterisk to communicate with each other across a cluster. For example, MWI events could be allowed to be distributed among multiple Asterisk servers. This means it is now possible to have SIP endpoints registered to a different server rather than the one holding their mailboxes.

For a complete list of changes since Asterisk 1.4, visit: http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/tags/1.6.0/CHANGES.