Commetrex Announces FoIP Breakthrough

Company Says TDM Success Rates Achieved with FoIP

 

Roswell, GA March 25, 2010 – Commetrex announced today that it has applied for a patent on technology the company says may finally make IP-based fax directly connected to IP-carrier networks nearly as reliable as PSTN fax. The technology, which Commetrex calls “Smart FoIP™,” applies to servers that support both T.38 and G.711-pass-through fax, gateways, and ATAs to make SIP-based call setup and the ensuing transaction nearly error free.

 

According to Cliff Schornak, Commetrex’ CTO, and one of the listed inventors, “Over a three-month period last year, we worked with Copia International, a user of our BladeWare fax-server platform, in an effort to allow Copia’s fax-broadcast customers to take full advantage of the economics of IP telephony. We succeeded, but not before we found that without the technology we developed, the success of our fax calls was well below that of traditional multi-line fax boards and even lower than that of T.38-only servers.”

 

Schornak continued, “We thought that our fax-server platform, BladeWare, with its support for 711 pass-through fax in addition to T.38, would have the highest success rate. But when we disallowed G.711 on the server, the success rate, much to our surprise, actually improved by 10 percent. It wasn’t due to the well-known problems of G.711 IP fax. The problem was that frequently, by the time the carrier networks issue their SIP re-invite from G.711, which is the initial mode of all network-based IP fax calls, to T.38, the fax session had progressed beyond the point where the switch to T.38 could be made.”

 

With this mind, Commetrex developed Smart FoIP, which puts intelligence into the decision by the on-ramp (calling) gateway of whether to accept or reject the T.38 re-invite of the off-ramp (receiving) gateway. Servers with support for T.38 and G.711 pass-through fax and Smart FoIP have call-completion rates on a par with PSTN fax and five-percent better than a server with support for only T.38. Versions of the new technology have been developed for BladeWare and Commetrex’ T.38 fax relay licensed technology for semiconductor, gateway, and ATA OEMs.

 

Steve Hersee, CEO of Copia International, commented, “Now, our customers can enjoy outbound completion rates on a par with multi-line fax boards and well above that of fax servers that only support T.38 and are not equipped with this new technology.”

About Commetrex Corporation

 

Commetrex, after providing industry-leading fax technologies to the telecom equipment OEM for over a decade, has developed BladeWare™, an advanced-architecture all-software telephony platform that supports FoIP with SIP signaling. In 2009, the company added support for digital and analog PSTN connectivity in partnership with Sangoma Technologies. The addition of support for PCI and PCI Express boards for analog office and station interfaces and ISDN PRI and BRI gives Commetrex the industry’s broadest fax-telephony product line for the enterprise-fax OEM. Commetrex’ list of technology licensees is a who’s who of the telecom industry, including 8X8, Altigen, Aspect, Audiocodes, Avaya, Broadsoft, Copia International, Digium, emFAST, Interactive Intelligence, Openwave, Radisys, Sagem-Interstar, Shoretel, Siemens, Tektronix, and Sonus Networks.