Second Quarter 2010

     I recently spoke with a vice president of engineering at a large enterprise-fax vendor. Our customer wanted to know if we had a program to establish interop certifications with IP carriers. Prior to that I had spoken with a product-management director at another large enterprise-fax server vendor (actually, our largest customer), and he wanted to know if we had a certification lab for various gateways. I didn’t have good answers to either question. We just don’t have the resources and scale to make a reasonable dent in the massive numbers of carriers and gateway vendors.

     I imagine that with all the OEMs we have out there, nearly all of the carriers and gateways have been covered by now. And, on a practical basis, most of the carriers use Commetrex' T.38 technology in their gateways. Moreover, most of the value-adding service networks use Commetrex-based fax media servers. And then there was our hugely successful T.38 Interoperability Test Lab, which, in 2002-2004, made Commetrex’ T.38 the industry’s T.38 interoperability benchmark. But if you’re looking for certifications, other than our own, we don’t have them.

     Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the marketing value of these certifications, especially when the “other guy” has them, and he does. But with BladeWare’s, six years of field experience, we have found that, on a practical basis, their importance is secondary to the question of performance and transaction success in carrier networks. This is because certifications are done in near-lab-like environments, but the challenges come in real-life networks.

     In previous letters I’ve noted that the industry’s deployment of FoIP is proceeding in phases. Phase I, which extended from T.38’s publication in October 1998 to just a few years ago, was characterized by the need for interoperability between intra-enterprise network elements, such as between an ATA and a gateway. These problems were relatively easy to solve since both manufacturers were usually eager to solve these problems.

     But now that enterprises are extending the reach of their IP networks by connecting directly with IP carriers and SIP trunking, we are confronted with challenges of a different sort. The front lines of the FoIP wars have moved. Yes, sometimes we encounter rear-guard harassment of registration, authentication, and configuration problems, but they are usually dispatched with a good read of a Wireshark capture. Today’s real battles go way beyond simple interop and equipment configuration to getting a call from an ATA or an IP-based fax server to a PSTN-connected fax terminal after transiting multiple IP-carrier networks.

     We are fully engaged in “making FoIP work.” Today, we are working with carriers to correct the problems within their networks that are keeping FoIP from achieving the transaction success rates of PSTN fax. If IP is going to replace TDM, it has to happen, and Commetrex is leading the way.

     If you want to know more about what Commetrex is doing to “Make FoIP Work,” give us a call.