The Commetrex Outlook | January 2008

What’s Planned for 2008?

Expect big things from Commetrex in 2008, including an expanded product offering. We will continue to build on our fax heritage with a suite of new offerings including Email-to-Fax and Print-to-Fax solutions. In addition, we are planning to roll out a series of new boards including the previously announced MSP-H8 and MSP-640, as well as new ISDN boards, primarily focused on the European marketplace. Finally, our VoiceXML strategy will continue to evolve with the release of our VoiceXML browser in late Q2.

2008 will be an exciting year at Commetrex.

Happy New Year from all of us! May it be healthy and prosperous for you.

Air Force Files OTF Kernel Flight Plan

A telecom-equipment test activity of the US Air Force has a massive test load. Much of the equipment under test, and, therefore, the test equipment, is ISDN-based. In order to meet its test schedule, the Air Force decided that it needed a flexible way to connect any article under test with any piece of equipment in its test lab. It needed a special ISDN switch with some very special and configurable routing rules. Not only is there a need to support the existing huge installed base of ISDN equipment, but the move to IP-based systems is already underway, requiring that any system developed to support TDM to TDM connections today must soon support SIP-to-ISDN, and SIP-to-SIP, and do so using vendor-independent network-connectivity resources.

The answer? Commetrex’ Open Telecommunications Framework® Kernel Why OTF Kernel? Because OTF Kernel is the only open telephony middleware designed specifically to be resource independent, to support multiple applications with resource sharing, and provide basic PBX (port-to-port) switching capability.

OTF Kernel achieves its resource independence by isolating signaling, switching, routing, and media-processing resources, which are vendor specific, behind “resource service managers (RSMs). Since the RSMs use generic protocols to communicate with the system kernel, the applications are also resource independent.

For this system, Commetrex developed an RSM to support the Cantata NS301 Octal CompactPCI DS-1 interface board. Support for a higher-density (16 DS-1s) Dialogic board, followed by Commetrex’ standard SIP RSM, will follow.

The system’s call-routing application extracts the called number from the ISDN signaling and directs the call to the desired trunk route. A table is used to determine the appropriate routing algorithm. Operations include stripping or adding digits to the called number, number substitution, and the ability to statistically route calls.

Read more about OTF or email sales@commetrex.com.

Commetrex Opens EU Office In The UK

Although nothing beats 13 years in the field to improve interoperability, we’ve recently subjected our T.30 protocol engine and fax modems, including our newly developed (but based on Paradyne’s 11-years-in-the-field data-modem technology) V.34 fax modem to the most-rigorous testing possible, and we passed everything. Well–yes–we did have to fix a few things along the way.

Prior to telecom deregulation in the EU, Germany’s rigorous FTZ 18TR53 test standard was mandatory for all fax terminals sold in Germany. With the relaxation of official mandatory requirements, 18 manufacturers, including Alcatel, Canon, and IBM, developed a fax-terminal interoperability test suite called the “Definitive Tele-Facsimile Standard” or DTS. With 1339 different tests, DTS is even more rigorous than the original FTZ 18TR53, so if your technology can make it through, as ours did, you can be assured of the ultimate in interoperability.

We’ve also performed extensive testing with QualityLogic’s FaxLab, which we used during our V.34 development project. In addition, QualityLogic ran our T.30 and fax modems through their “TSB-85 Fax Functional Test Suite.” TSB-85 was developed by the Electronics Industries Alliance for much the same purpose as DTS. According to QualityLogic, “TSB-85 covers all of the standard T.30 flowchart branches and a considerable number of its error-recovery schemes.” Commetrex’ fax technology passed all of the TSB-85 tests as well.

Want to know more? Give Cliff Schornak a call at 1-770-407-6027.

So, what did we have to do to set that up? Nothing except get a broadband connection in the UK, which was hard enough. After one month of begging the incumbent, Virgin had it done in a week.

BladeWareVXML, A VoiceXML Interpreter That Rocks!

As you may recall, earlier this year Commetrex introduced BladeWareVXMLInterpreter, our new-and-improved version of OpenVXi, the open-source VXML interpreter from Scansoft. Our version is also open-source, and available for download from SourceForge.

We use the same APIs as OpenVXi–good news for current VXi users–but we’ve also added some major enhancements. (This is for the techies in the crowd.) It’s VoiceXML 2.1 compliant. It includes a DTMF recognizer. It has enhanced MRCP integration capability and has an SRGS grammar parser with SISR support built-in. In addition, we made some significant changes to enhance performance, including limiting the number of Xerces parsers that are created and compressing the JavaScript files used by VoiceXML 2.1 element. We also deferred loading the JavaScript until a element is actually hit by the interpreter. We have just released version 4 and version 5 is planned for early next year.

But here is the big news: Initial testing by customers has shown performance improvements of 5-10 times over previous versions of OpenVXi. Here is the skinny:

Configuration: 2 dual-core CPUs – Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5160 @ 3-GHz; 4-GB RAM Results: 1000-channel test: 500 30-second calls delivered to each channel required an average total CPU usage of only 10%.

A commercial version, BladeWareVXMLCommercial Edition, is now available from Commetrex, which includes support and commercial licenses. A full VoiceXML browser is planned for Q1, 2008. If voiceXML is in your future plans, take BladeWareVXML for a test drive and you be the judge!

Need more information? Contact us at 770-449-7775 (hit 1) or sales@commetrex.com.