It is with great pleasure I wish to inform you of the first beta release of the new Asterisk 15 branch. It’s a very exciting time to be a user of Asterisk! Asterisk 15 is arguably the biggest release of Asterisk that has happened in the last 10 or so years. There has been a lot of work done in the Asterisk core to better support newer multi-stream video and WebRTC related technologies. For those who are interested, much of this will be covered in blog posts at http://blogs.asterisk.org/ over the next month or two.

Typically, when a new major branch of Asterisk is created (13, 14,
15…), there are a few months of testing on the new branch that occurs prior to release in order to find regressions and other issues that may cause a first official release from the branch to be dead on arrival for a significant number of users. With today’s release of
15.0.0-beta1, this process has begun. Please feel free to start testing this version of Asterisk in as many adverse environments as possible. Any bugs should be reported on the Asterisk issue tracker at https://issues.asterisk.org/

As a side note, due to many of the core changes in the 15 branch that have been made since Asterisk 14 was released, it has been decided that Asterisk 15 will not be an LTS release. For those of you who are not familiar with the differences between LTS versus standard releases, you can find more information here [1].

Thanks to all the many Asterisk community members for providing so much help and support to make Asterisk the great open source project that it is.

P.S. Binary codecs and other modules distributed by Digium are not immediately available for 15.0.0-beta1, but should be shortly.

Best wishes to all, and happy testing!

[1] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions