The Outlook | December 2015

The Force Awakens

If you thought the new Star Wars® movie was exciting, you will not be able to wait to see Commetrex at Channel Vision Expo (CVx) in warm Ft. Lauderdale, FL, in booth 130, January 26-28, 2016! It is time to free your customer from the dark side of POTS for fax and join a force that cannot be matched.

Our sister company, NetGen Communications, is in the main ITEXPO in booth 234 as well.

By visiting both booths, you can learn how BladeWare can provide necessary solutions for OEMs, and how NetGen can help complete offerings for ITSPs, carriers, LECs and end-users. Register now for your free pass to the exhibition today here!

State Of The Union 2016: Telecom Survey

Commetrex, in coordination with NetGen Communications is conducting a survey of telecom-industry participants to forecast the state of the service-provider and channel market in 2016. The survey, “State of the Union: Telecom Survey 2016”,which takes two minutes to complete, is available on-line at www.netgencommunications.com/survey_2016. As an incentive, all participants will receive the full report.

Media Control

Over 10 years ago, Commetrex developed the fax extensions to the Media Server Control Mark-up Language (MSCML), as specified in RFC5022. In a decomposed service network, such as IMS, application servers use a SIP-based media-server control protocol to transfer calls that require fax services to Commetrex’ BladeWare FMS and to specify the URL where a received fax TIFF-F file should be stored or where the file should be sourced for a send operation.

This means the FMS application turns BladeWare into a “dumb” appliance (or a media resource in IMS speak), commanded by a SIP application server.

BladeWare FMS is used by many of Commetrex’ unified-communications OEMs to separate their application logic from the fax send-receive resources.

But the success of MSCML spawned the IETF’s development of the Media Control framework and associated Media Packages, such as voice play-record, announcements, and conferencing. The Media Control Channel Framework, which is much more flexible and extensible than MSCML, is specified in RFC6230.

So, here’s the point: are you interested in Media Control? Do you know anyone using it? If so, please email us at marketing@commetrex.com or call 770-449-7775 and press 1.

SecureSecure Fax Anybody?

Application-level secure fax has been specified by T.30 for many years, but it’s never gained traction in PSTN fax due to chicken-or-egg problems and lack of demand since a fairly high level of security is offered by physical access to the call’s circuit being required for intercept. But FoIP calls are much easier to intercept, causing questions regarding fax security to arise. So, in 2014, the IETF released RFC7345, UDP Transport Layer (UDPTL) over Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), to address the need.

Although both RTP and UDPTL are specified as supported transports in T.38, very few T.38 calls use RTP or SRTP; UDPTL is the overwhelming favorite for T.38 calls, which is why the IETF followed the recommendation of the 3GPP, and chose the UDPTL as the exclusive transport for the RFC7345 secure-fax recommendation.

Our question is will RFC7345 gain widespread acceptance?
Although it’s rather straightforward, we have not added it to our relays or servers, and wonder whether you would use it if we did. Would you? As an informal poll, please let us know if you are interested in secure fax.

Click Here if you would like to schedule an evaluation.