Commetrex Ships Multi-Modal Terminating Fax

For Immediate Release

Roswell, GA, June 30, 2003 – Commetrex Corporation announced today the immediate availability of Multi-Modal Terminating Fax. The product allows media-servers to send and receive real-time faxes from all gateways, even those that do not support T.38 fax relay, which has been the province of Commetrex’ TerminatingT38 product. Multi-Modal Fax uses one T.30 protocol engine to support real-time faxes transported over both IP and PSTN, or over IP with gateways using G.711 modem pass-through or T.38 fax relay. Both host-signal-processing and embedded versions are available.

Paul Baron, Commetrex’ Director of Worldwide Sales, seemed pleased at the prospect of marketing the new product: “Multi-Modal Terminating Fax removes the last technology barrier standing in the way of the wide scale deployment of real-time IP-fax value-added services. Prior to our TerminatingT38, IP-based media servers couldn’t terminate T.38 real-time faxes. Now, Multi-Modal Fax adds to this the capability of terminating faxes from non-T.38-capable gateways, which required an integration of our Fax Modem Bundle into the system. Media- server vendors increase their product’s value by allowing fax service providers that leverage the Internet for fax delivery by offering real-time fax in addition to the store-and-forward method they use today."

Cliff Schornak, Commetrex’ CTO, explained the technology: “T.30 is the ITU standard used to terminate a fax, but what goes on between two T.30 endpoints can involve quite a range of technologies. The simplest is a straight PSTN connection, which only requires analog fax modems. But mix in support for IP and things can get complicated.

“T.38 is the ITU standard for gateways to handle real-time IP fax relay, but not all gateways support T.38. Instead, they simply take the analog stream and pass it through the gateway as a G.711 stream. It’s not very robust, but if a server wants to be able to terminate faxes from both types of gateways, the G.711 stream must be demodulated by fax modems.”

Commetrex Corporation
Commetrex Corporation develops and markets enabling technologies designed to shorten the time to market and reduce the development cost of integrated- media telecommunications equipment. Long known for its market-leading fax and other licensed technologies, Commetrex is now completing a multi-year development effort to offer the equipment developer middleware software products and a media-stream framework, plus a comprehensive line of PCI and CompactPCI DSP-resource and network-interface boards.