Commetrex TerminatingT38 & Cisco AS5300 Interoperate
T.38 Protocol for Real-Time IP Fax Takes Step Forward

For Immediate Release

Norcross, GA, October 30, 2001 – Commetrex, a world leader in fax technology, announced today that it has successfully completed interoperability testing of its TerminatingT38™ and PowerRelay™ products with the Cisco AS5300 gateway. Cliff Schornak, Commetrex’s CTO, who participated in the testing, is pleased with the ‘out-of-the-box’ compatibility of the two products: “T.38, the ITU recommendation for real-time fax over IP, is a relatively new specification; there hasn’t been that much interoperability testing around the industry, as many of the deployments have been within private networks. So I was pleasantly surprised when we sent a fax from the Cisco side of the network to our TerminatingT38 and we received it correctly on the first attempt. The obvious meaning here is that engineers at both companies interpreted the ITU recommendation in the same way. That’s a good thing.”

“We did have a small problem sending to the AS5300”, continued Schornak. “Cisco was a little restrictive in the format of the packets it would process. We tweaked our formatting slightly and were able to send to the 5300. The whole effort took just one day. I hope the testing we plan to do with other vendors’ products is this easy.”

While T.37 specifies how a fax image is sent as e-mail in a store-and-forward mode, T.38 specifies a protocol that PSTN-IP gateways can follow to transport faxes in real time using IP, the Internet Protocol. Commetrex’ TerminatingT38 product uses the T.38 protocol, just as a gateway does (see diagram), but instead of relaying the fax to the PSTN and on to a legacy fax terminal, it couples Commetrex T.38 protocol engine with their T.30 protocol software to terminate the fax session in a media server or network-service platform. No DSP resources are required, as the T.38 module couples the T.30 protocol engine to the network instead of fax modems. Two hundred simultaneous TerminatingT38 sessions will run on one 750-MHz Pentium processor.

Real-time faxes can be transported over IP without T.38 provided the underlying network is a well-managed, high-performance network with little delay, jitter, or packet loss. The T.38 protocol allows a fax session to successfully complete even over the public Internet. Commetrex’ T.38 handles over five seconds of packet delay.

CT Expo covers a spectrum of communications platform products, components and services showcasing new communications technologies to a wide range of industry professionals such as manufacturers, developers, consultants, service providers, channel entities, and managers. Simon Cooper, Executive Director of Events for CMP adds: "CT Expo significantly broadened its reach in 2001. With converging technologies as this year's show theme, the display of products went far beyond the traditional CTI/Call Center portfolio. And to receive a Best of Show Award in this competitive marketplace is a great achievement."

Commetrex Corporation
Commetrex Corporation, known for its innovations in fax technology, has recently developed the open-communications industry's first platform for system development that supports the industry's two primary standards for open-system environments: the MSP Consortium M.100 software environment for media integration and the ECTF S.100 software environment for application integration. Both products are available with the company's MSP Media Gateway product line featuring the Texas Instruments TMS320C6000 family of DSPs. The MSP Media Gateway products support voice, fax, high-speed data, VoIP and FoIP. Commetrex also extends its support of the communications system developer to the media-processing algorithm level, and is an active participant in Texas Instrument's Third Party Developer Network.