First Quarter 2010

     We like to think of Commetrex as the leading innovator of fax technology without qualification. We’re not the biggest, but when it comes to innovation, we’re the best. Consider: In the mid-90s we produced the industry’s first software fax add-in product, by adding fax to the NMS voice boards. In 2000, we invented TerminatingT38. Then, there was Multi-Modal Terminating Fax, which supported both T.38 and G.711 IP-fax termination. In 2002, it was the T.38 Interop Lab. And now, we believe we’ve solved a huge problem that’s been plaguing the industry ever since enterprises began to use SIP trunking and direct SIP peering for their IP-fax servers, gateways, and ATAs. We believe this to be a breakthrough in IP-based fax reliability.

     In partnership with Copia International, a noted vendor of mission-critical fax-broadcast servers and BladeWare user, Commetrex was able to achieve broadcast success rates on a par with those obtained with a multi-line intelligent fax board. We’ve even applied for a patent. The new technology works entirely within the framework of the SIP and T.38 standards. We have done extensive A-B testing with VoIP service providers and IP carriers and have found that servers that only support T.38 have an outbound fax-call completion rate that is five-percent lower than BladeWare equipped with G.711 pass-through support and Smart FoIP.

     The ITU’s T.38 recommendation was released in 1998, and, for 10 years, what we call T.38 Phase I, the use of T.38 was relegated to intra-enterprise applications, so interop and transaction reliability were fairly easy to achieve since the user controlled all the equipment. The problem has to do with enterprise user’s recent push to use FoIP (fax over IP) beyond the confines of enterprise gateways and analog telephone adapters (ATAs). There was little choice in the matter since almost no carriers supported T.38, and what we call “G.711 pass-through fax”, where the fax call is, essentially, treated as a voice call, was found to be too error-prone over the public Internet. But now we’re finally entering “Phase II” of T.38 deployment

     Phase II, the use of FoIP for carrier-based calls, got underway a few years ago as some of the major IP carriers, such as XO Communications and Global Crossing, began to offer T.38 service agreements to enterprise customers. The VoIP service providers began to offer SIP trunking and direct SIP peering, obviating the need for enterprise gateways. And suddenly, FoIP became a big problem for the fax-server vendors and their enterprise customers.

     Instead of working with the more-accessible gateway manufacturer, the business user had to try to work with the less-accessible service provider and IP carrier when he found that, for some reason, the reliability of making a fax call was well below the standards established by old reliable TDM fax over the PSTN. The problem has become so bad that many businesses still use the PSTN for all faxing, even though the enterprise has moved to 100-percent VoIP for voice. The reasons for this state of affairs were many. Some vendors even blamed the T.38 recommendation for the problem. But the industry has responded with improvements in T.38 interoperability and broader deployments of T.38-capable networks. Even so, problems placing calls from ATA-connected fax terminals and T.38-based fax servers persist.

     According to Steve Hersee, CEO of Copia International, “Our broadcast-fax customers, looking for the promised saving of FoIP, have been asking for FoIP-based fax broadcast for the last few years. So, we ran some trials with our CopiaFacts server running on Commetrex’ BladeWare FoIP platform. Our first tests were with BladeWare supporting both T.38 and G.711. We were disappointed as the completion rates were 15-percent below that of our PSTN fax boards. Then, the Commetrex engineers dug into the problem and found that many of the fax sessions failed when BladeWare accepted the network’s SIP re-invite to go from G.711 to T.38. After several weeks of testing, retesting, and head scratching, they found that the re-invites from our carrier partners were often arriving so late that the server and the PSTN-connected fax terminal were well into the G.711-based T.30 fax transaction, with the switchover to T.38 effectively killing the session. This was proven when we disabled G.711 support in BladeWare and, suddenly, the success rate shot up 10-percent. ”

     But we still weren’t satisfied. We want BladeWare to not just be nearly as good, but as good as the traditional fax server for connection rates. And in T.38-only mode, we still had five-percent of the sessions failing when the re-invite was so late in arriving that the called terminal would just give up waiting for a response in G.711 mode. So, we went to work and developed our patent-applied-for T.38 fax-server technology that solves that problem by allowing the fax to complete in G.711 mode if the T.38 re-invite arrives too late.

     And our users don’t need to be concerned with the G.711 pass-through session. In much of the world our carrier friends have virtually eliminated packet loss, leaving PCM-clock synchronization as the chief concern. But even that works because of Commetrex’ proprietary “smart buffering” technology for G.711 mode. It eliminates PCM clock synchronization as a source of error in G.711 pass-through calls, which is the reason for longer faxes failing.

     With this latest improvement in the state of the art, we believe our innovation creds remain intact.