We are pleased to announce the public testing of our “newsip” platform. This represents the next generation of our Centrex platform and a significant difference in approach to the way phone calls are routed.

It also supports a number of new features, most noticably group call pickup and lit lamps.

How does newsip work?

Newsip is based on a pair of OpenSER proxies at the front end, which phones will register against. These use a common database so are always in sync. The SIP proxy name is newsip.gradwell.net.

Then, calls are routed to/from the PSTN through a load balanced cluster of asterisk servers. These servers are now running a much newer version of asterisk - version 1.4.11.

What issues does newsip address?
Newsip has the following design goals:

• A more resiliant and scalable architecture, giving faster failover in the event of a specific machine /asterisk instance failing, and going beyond our current 5000 user base
• Less handling of audio in asterisk, and a newer version of asterisk, so it should improve call drop rates.
• Ability to support new features, such as lit lamps

Newsip System Reliability
We have now finished configuring asterisk and OpenSER, and the primary objective of this test is to ensure our dial plan logic is all ok. The newsip equipment is also the production equipment it will run on (apart from the mysql cluster it needs, which is being deployed).

We do not therefore anticipate any unplanned downtime, but inevitably we will need to make configuration changes. We will do config changes that are service affecting between 18:00 and 22:00, so trial users should be able to use it in their normal office environment - abeit with the usual beta test caveats!

Newsip support and mailing list
Newsip is in beta, and is not currently supported through our main customer support channels. We have instead setup a discussion mailing list, to where questions should be directed. Please visit http://list.gradwell.net/mailman/listinfo/newsip to subscribe and review the archives.

Things we still need to do to make it a production service:

• Agree g729 licence issues with digium and get a site licence (done)
• Complete testing of our SIP VRRP daemon (done)
• Replace the single mysql instance with our mysql cluster (done)
• Test lit lamps across more devices (done)
• Consider lamps security and whether we want an XCAP server
• Check that resellers work ok on it (done)

How do I use it?
To use newsip, if you are a reseller then in the CSR control panel, set your extensions, huntgroups, aliases, etc. to use the newsip pbx host.

If you are not a reseller, please email peter@gradwell.com and ask for your extensions to be moved. Please also specify a time when you would like this to happen - as you will need to change your phones to register on the new server.

Reseller DNS Entries
Resellers should point their DNS to the two IP addresses:
79.135.125.154
79.135.125.155

Also, you can define SRV records as follows:

host: _sip._udp.newsip data: 1 50 5060 v-sip-1.gradwell.net
host: _sip._udp.newsip data: 1 50 5060 v-sip-2.gradwell.net