The Commetrex Outlook | May 2008

$5.95 Per Month Per Subscriber?

With products on the market in 1999, Cisco and Commetrex were early supporters of T.38 fax relay. For its part, Commetrex shipped its T.38 relay one year after T.38 was determined by the ITU. And today it’s the technology behind many of the industry’s finest gateways. But we knew that IP networks would soon need to host terminating-fax services, so we invented terminating T.38 and shipped serial number one for Commetrex and the industry in May 2001. This innovation has led to the increasingly wide deployment of IP-based hosted fax services. Today, the majority of worldwide service deployments are based on Commetrex’ BladeWare fax media server or our TerminatingT38 licensed media technology.

Meanwhile, Cisco used a different approach to meet the need for error-free IP-fax termination by adding the resources to selected Cisco gateways required to actually terminate PSTN faxes in the gateway. The fax image file could then be sent to the IP-based server via T.37, the ITU’s fax store-and-forward protocol. Even though this required significant additional compute power and RAM in every gateway in the network, the solution became widely deployed.

However, TerminatingT38 obviated the need for such a resource-intensive solution since it allows the fax media to be relayed through the relay to a centralized all-software fax media server. Faxes could be resent via T.38 through the network’s gateway, or e-mailed to and from subscribers, which is the function implemented by many of the TerminatingT38-equipped unified-messaging systems deployed today.

But Commetrex received requests for a more tightly focused solution. VoIP service providers have said, “Look, all we want to do is deploy a system that e-mails received faxes to our subscribers (fax-to-email) and fax image files we receive from our subscribers (email-to-fax).” We said, “OK”, and developed BladeWare Fax2Email and Email2Fax. And, in partnership with Agnity, Inc., a Fremont-based network consultancy, we’ve added the network-signaling features required to emulate the Cisco T.37-based solution, but without the expense and vendor lock-in of fax termination in the service provider’s gateways.

Interested in a quick-to-revenue service deployment? Contact us at 770-449-7775 (hit 1) or sales@commetrex.com.

Commetrex Inside!

If you’ve read the last two issues of the Commetrex Outlook, you know we’ve been pumping our V.34 fax modem. In January we talked about all the testing we did on it; in the March issue we laid out our product roadmap. And, well, here we go again.

We are proud to announce that a global manufacturer of multi-function peripherals (MFP: scan, print, fax, copy), now has an MFP in retail distribution, based on a Marvell Semiconductor ASIC for which we contributed the voice-fax subsystem software, which, of course, includes our V.34 fax modem. The total package includes Commetrex’ OpenMedia streams framework, with DTMF, CPA, G.726 for answering machine support, and PortableT30 along with all of our fax modems.

If you have a product entering your development pipeline that requires fax technologies, such as T.30, T.38, and fax modems, visit our Website where all of it is on our products page. For in-depth technical assistance give “sales” a call at 770-449-7775 (push 1) or email.

For Your Viewing Pleasure: FaxIP For Skype On YouTube

Check out our FaxIP for Skype demo video on YouTube. FaxIP for Skype is the first in a series of personal-fax products offered by our NetGen Communications spin out. FaxIP allows a Skyper to send real-time (not store-and-forward) faxes anywhere absolutely free. Wonder how? Check out the video. Interested? Give NetGen a call at 770-449-7704. (V.17, etc.).

Kernel Mode Media Processing In HMP?

Some of our BladeWare customers have asked us why we don’t have OpenMedia, BladeWare’s HMP media- processing framework, run in kernel mode. Well, the short answer is because it doesn’t need to, and since there are some disadvantages to running in kernel mode, we don’t. BladeWare runs at high real-time priority, which works just fine.

Note that there are different reasons for running in kernel mode. At least one product on the market emulates the TDM architecture of a legacy line of PCI boards, with very tight timing that requires certain code segments to run without interruption. But kernel mode doesn’t magically make the computer run faster. There’s still the same number of MIPS; kernel mode is simply another way to control how those MIPS are allocated by the OS. BladeWare was designed from the ground up for portability and uses OpenMedia, which has a highly advanced scheduling algorithm for media processing that does not have critical timing dependencies.

Of course, any system can become overloaded, including those that utilize kernel-mode processing. But OpenMedia monitors its real-time performance, and if it begins to fall too far behind real time it sheds load. But that rarely happens since BladeWare easily runs 100 T.38 or 50 G.711 pass-through fax channels on a 2.1-GHz dual-core Intel or AMD processor and still leaves plenty of MIPS for your application.

Want to argue the point? Shoot us an e-mail at sales@commetrex.com.