$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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Interested in a quick-to-revenue service deployment? Contact
Tom Ray at 770-407-6025. Or send him an e-mail
at (tray@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 or e-mail (sales@commmetrex.com).
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For Your Viewing Pleasure: FaxIP for Skype on YouTube
Check out our FaxIP for Skype demo video on YouTube at (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QszIozanbs). 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.
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
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