Sippy Softswitch 2021 Teaser

Hello Everyone,

The team at Sippy Software is busy preparing the last few details of our upcoming release. We will be presenting many of the details for our upcoming release during a Launch event planned on November 9th, 2021 at 8 am UTC-7. During this launch event Max our CEO and our team will be talking about a wide range of initiatives to improve the services you offer as well as let you know about some of the changes we have to better support you and your team.

To give you a better sense of what to expect here is an early look at some of the major features we have worked on over the past year.

SS-4002 - Stir\Shaken Support

STIR\SHAKEN can now be handled by the softswitch to both sign and verify calls locally. In the most recent versions of Sippy 2020 we backported signing functionality through 1 Call Connect. Calls were sent to them to be returned with a signature bound for their final destination. In Sippy 2021 Calls can now be signed and verified using a local service on the softswitch instead of sending it off to a third party. This offers our customers some flexibility if they wish to handle the signing and verification themselves or send/receive the data to/from a third party offloading the work. All this to meet the latest regulatory compliance for Calls bound to North America.

SS-2399 - Update to Python3

Python 2.7 while very reliable and robust for several years, finally reached the end of it’s days at the beginning of 2020. This meant security patches and improvements to python would no longer be made and it was time to update our codebase to Python3. Python3 had a number of improvements as well as syntax changes that needed to be resolved as part of this migration and we took the time to update all our python based components to use Python 3. Almost all of the critical components in our software needed to be adjusted including our python version of b2bua, Session Tracker, and our monitoring are just a few examples where we needed to make changes. This will extend the life cycle of Sippy 2021 for some time.

SS-4492 - Submenu for System Parameter Pages

Our page for System Parameters has been growing and growing for some time. It was finally time to divide the page into more discrete pages and eliminate the noise from other fields that aren’t relevant for the configuration choices you need to make. This change should make it easier for users to make the changes they need without having to feel distracted by other fields that are not relevant to the task at hand. A support article will be published outlining all the changes and articles in our support knowledge base will all be updated over the coming weeks.

SS-3360 - Capacity Credit

We are introducing a new feature that will allow some more flexibility for high Concurrent Channel and Calls Per Second on your softswitch. Email warnings will better inform switch operators of high levels of traffic on your softswitch. This will help you better gauge when you need to add additional capacity to your softswitch. Messages will be sent out as you reach 95%, 100%. An additional 5% capacity credit will be allowed thereby ensuring that during unusual high traffic activity you do not lose on completing those calls. New calls if you exceed this Capacity Credit will not be processed until traffic on your system subsides. To maintain this system softswitch owners will be advised to ensure traffic to our systems is whitelisted as this will be a requirement going forward. Please contact support for an updated list of IP addresses to include on your whitelist for your firewall policies. If your softswitch is unable to connect to our servers for an extended period of time your switch capacity will be scaled back until you can reconnect to our server. This is also a further security measure that helps you control call traffic.

SS-3362 - TLS VoIP Security

A long awaited feature we have worked on is adding SIP TLS functionality to our softswitch. Adding SIP TLS will open new opportunities with vendors or clients that need that extra layer of security as calls are passed either to or from the softswitch. This change required several changes across multiple components in the softswitch including the B2BUA, Firewall, and API methods.

SS-1729 - CDR Separation

The CDR data is by far the largest amount of data that is kept on the softswitch. It’s used for a wide range of features including billing, rerate procedures, and troubleshooting just to name a small few. CDRs make a large slice of the database pie and it made sense to separate it from the configuration data. So much like our work on Balances in Sippy 5.0 we set off to make a call records database that’s separated from your configurations making this critical data more readily available to not only the switch but to external devices as well. By doing this we also gain the ability to centralize CDR records so multiple nodes on a network will be able to post records to a singular device. This becomes incredibly important for features like Clustering as all the nodes in a clustered network will need to be able to write to the same database in a timely manner.