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Asterisk 22.11 RC: WebSocket Proxies and Keepalives

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On August 7, 2026 the Asterisk Development Team published release candidates across three lines at once: 22.11.0-rc1 (the current LTS), 23.5.0-rc1 and 20.21.0-rc1. All three carry the same payload — 38 commits from 16 authors resolving 27 issues — and, notably, zero security advisories. This is a feature-and-fixes cycle, not a patch-now emergency.

The headline additions are on the WebSocket transport: outbound connections can now go through a proxy, and keepalives are finally configurable. If you run Asterisk behind a corporate egress proxy or terminate WebSockets through a load balancer that kills idle connections, this is the release you have been waiting for.

What is new

Outbound WebSocket proxies and keepalives

Two changes land together here.

Issue #1881 adds HTTP proxy support for outbound WebSocket connections — forward and outbound proxies can now be specified, so an Asterisk box that is not allowed to open arbitrary connections to the internet can still reach an external WebSocket endpoint through the sanctioned egress path.

Issue #1933 makes keepalives configurable, at both the TCP level and via WebSocket PING/PONG frames. Idle WebSocket connections silently dropped by an intermediary are one of the more irritating classes of production bug — the connection looks alive to Asterisk and dead to everything else. Application-level PING/PONG is the standard fix, and it is now a config option rather than something you work around.

PJSIP: external_signaling_hostname

A new transport option, external_signaling_hostname (#1749), lets you put an FQDN rather than a bare IP into Contact and Via headers. Anyone who has run Asterisk behind NAT, a floating IP or a DNS-based failover pair knows why this matters: the existing external_signaling_address options work in IP terms, which is awkward when the address you actually want peers to come back to is a name.

On the 23.5 branch, #871 additionally stores transport information on outgoing PJSIP channels so address queries resolve correctly.

Recording and audiohooks

TOUCH_MIXMONITOR_OPTIONS (#1981) is a new channel variable for configuring automixmon options, which closes a long-standing gap between one-touch recording and MixMonitor's own flexibility.

Whisper audiohooks (#1966) no longer require a continuous stream of audio to function — previously you had to play silence to keep whispered frames flowing. And #1779 fixes garbled audio in duplex recordings when the codec is not 8kHz, which is an easy bug to hit the moment you move to wideband.

Fixes worth calling out

  • #2059 — intermittent call drops on reINVITE when the codec set changes. If you have chased a "calls occasionally die mid-conversation" ticket on a mixed-codec deployment, start here.
  • #2021 — segfault on an ARI transfer carrying a Refer-Sub: false header.
  • #1946 — lock inversion deadlocks between RTP/ICE and pjproject.
  • #1965 — session leaks caused by malformed 200 OK responses.
  • #1882 — WARNING and ERROR messages are no longer discarded when the logger queue hits its threshold. Losing precisely the log lines you need during an incident is the worst possible failure mode for a log queue.

Build-side, #2011 lets you override bundled pjproject build options through PJPROJECT_CFLAGS, which removes a common reason for maintaining a local patch.

No security advisories this time

The contrast with the previous cycle is worth noting. On June 25, 2026 the project shipped 23.4.1, 22.10.1, 21.12.3 and 20.20.1 as security releases covering roughly twenty advisories between them. This RC round resolves none, so if you are already patched to the June releases you can treat 22.11 as a planned upgrade rather than an urgent one.

Asterisk 24 is now in pre-release

Five days after the RCs, on August 12, 2026, the tag 24.0.0-pre1 appeared in the repository — the first public build of the next major version.

Asterisk ships a new major release on the third Wednesday of October each year, alternating between standard and LTS. Asterisk 22 (October 2024) was LTS, 23 (October 2025) was standard, which puts 24 in line to be the next LTS when it lands this October. If your upgrade planning runs on LTS boundaries, that is the version to start budgeting for — and the pre-release window is the cheapest time to discover that one of your modules does not compile.

For background on where the current LTS sits, see our Asterisk 22 LTS features and upgrade guide.

What to do now

Release candidates exist to be tested, and Asterisk's RC windows are short — GA typically follows within a couple of weeks. If any of the fixes above match a bug you have been living with, this is the moment to put the RC on a staging box and confirm it, because a report during the RC window still changes the release.

wget https://github.com/asterisk/asterisk/releases/download/22.11.0-rc1/asterisk-22.11.0-rc1.tar.gz

Certified users got their own build the same day: certified-22.8-cert4, published August 7, 2026.

Primary sources: the 22.11.0-rc1 and 23.5.0-rc1 release pages, and the 22.11.0-rc1 ChangeLog.

Running Asterisk in production and unsure whether to track 22 LTS or wait for 24? Get in touch — we plan and execute PBX upgrades that do not drop calls.

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