Commetrex, as the “Trusted Source for Fax Technology”™, has become the leading worldwide supplier of fax and fax-related technologies to the telecommunications OEM and system integrator. Many of the finest names in communications are licensees of Commetrex’ fax technology. They chose Commetrex because it means they will base their product on the very finest field-proven technology.

Now, Commetrex has integrated its award-winning product and technology portfolio into a next-generation architecture, called BladeWare^TM. BladeWare allows the enterprise and hosted-communications service provider OEM to avoid the dozens of developer-years needed to develop a comprehensive telephony framework. BladeWare allows you to cost-effectively develop applications where the underlying platform renders the network—IP or PSTN—or the transport—G.711 pass-through, T.38 fax relay, or traditional fax modems—transparent to the application. So, with BladeWare, you develop once and support any network or fax-transport type. Moreover, no proprietary hardware is required. Today, developers of enterprise systems must be able to take advantage of the power of today’s host processors, which double every 18 months while the MIPS required to process a fax media stream have remained constant, and, in the case of T.38, have actually gone down. In today’s market, business as usual with traditional “fax boards” just doesn’t fill the bill.

To learn more about the fax industry’s next-generation architecture, read this white paper: Open Telecommunications Framework®, A New Architecture for Fax Telephony.

Commetrex’ BladeWare (our host-media-processing value-adding platform), supports your proprietary application. But you can also choose from our ready-to-deploy applications: BladeWare Fax2Email Server, BladeWare Email2Fax Server, and BladeWare Fax Media Server.

If you're developing a fax server, an IP gateway, or network-based media server, Commetrex is the only fax-technology partner you will need. (We also have a comprehensive VoIP technology portfolio.) Commetrex’ fax modems, now available with V.34, in source- or object-code form, have 15 years of field-proven deployment. Quantitative testing shows they are superior to the most-popular modem chip. This modem technology and PortableT30™ are the basis of PowerFax for BladeWare^TM, the software product that makes the BladeWare supported MSP Product line of PSTN PCI and PCI Express boards the industry's most versatile and cost-effective "fax boards".

Are you designing a fax gateway?  You can license Commetrex’ PowerRelay^TM (T.38 Fax Relay), with support for both T.38 (Fax over IP), I.366.2 (Fax over ATM),  and FRF.11.1 frame relay. Combine PowerRelay with Commetrex’ fax modems for a complete gateway solution.  And rest assured that your product is based on the industry's best and most up-to-date technology. Our T.38 fax relay now supports T.38 Version 3 with V.34 (Super G3 fax). And we’ve recently added "Smart FoIP", which dramatically reduces call-setup failures, as an option.

Concerned about T.38 interoperability? Commetrex is the T.38 interoperability leader.  In January 2002, Commetrex announced the opening of its T.38 Interoperability Lab, which offers no-fee interop testing to any vendor with a fielded T.38-capable gateway.  . Since the Lab's opening, over a dozen companies have completed testing.  The T.38 Interop Lab has made Commetrex' T.38 Fax Relay and TerminatingT38 the industry's interoperability standards.

TerminatingT38™ (available with T.38 V3 support) lets you combine service-platform and gateway functionality in the same carrier-class product.  If you are a fax-server or media server vendor you can readily add the ability to terminate IP-based fax alongside legacy PSTN terminating fax.

Another Commetrex innovation is Multi-Modal Terminating Fax (MMTF). Enterprise platforms and network-based media servers must support fax regardless of the mode of transport (IP or PSTN) or the capability of an IP gateway (T.38 or G.711 pass-through).  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 insert an IP transport in the middle and things begin to get complicated.  T.38 is the ITU standard for gateways to handle real-time IP fax, but not all gateways support T.38.  Instead, they simply encode the analog stream and pass it through the gateway as a G.711 stream.  If you want your server to support every call, you want it to be able to terminate faxes from both types of gateways.

So Commetrex invented the Multi-Modal Terminating Fax, and it's now shipping.  This licensed technology uses one terminating T.30 protocol engine to support terminating faxes transported over both types of networks.  And if the network is IP, it supports both T.38 and G.711 pass-through.

Fax Boards That Aren't Fax Boards

We don’t actually sell fax boards or voice boards. With the power of today’s PCs, that just doesn’t make much sense since a 2.2-Gig dual-core PC comfortably runs 60 V.17 channels with plenty of headroom left for your application. Once you’ve paid for the PC, which you must have anyway, using the available MIPS costs you no more than leaving them idle and increases your ROI. So why not pay less than $200 per channel for your “fax board,” (software included) rather than $600?

BladeWare now supports V.34 Fax, which requires more MIPS than V.17, but that’s not a problem. If you run BladeWare on a dual-core Intel-architecture machine, sending a V.34 fax requires 25 MIPS while receiving a V.34 fax requires 33 MIPS. So, more than half the MIPS are available for your application.

Commetrex’ BladeWare HMP SIP- and PSTN-based telephony platform hosts Commetrex’ award-winning TerminatingT38, which we invented 10 years ago, our fax modems, which first shipped in 1994, and our integration of the entire line of Sangoma PSTN analog and digital telephony-interface boards. Think of these MSP boards as fax boards that aren’t fax boards since all they do is provide the PSTN interface. The price of these boards reflects their bare-bones functionality. What’s more, you write just one resource adapter, which enables your application to address

• SIP-based T.38,
• SIP-based G.711 pass-through fax,
• 2-24-line mix-n-match FXS and FXO trunks,
• Single-, dual-, and quad-span E1/T1 with ISDN PRI, and
• 2-48-ports of ISDN BRI.

And all on the same system at the same time.