The Commetrex Outlook | March 2012

ITEXPO East 2012 Rocked!

It is widely reported that trade-show attendance is a pretty good economic indicator … either leading or coincident. If that’s the case, the attendance at the recent ITEXPO in Miami Beach means the signs of economic revival are real. Attendance was better than any ITEXPO in the last several years. We had two speaking assignments plus a video interview (see below), a good booth location, and we left with a bundle of telephony-service-provider leads for Smart ATA.

Commetrex has never had a product where the response to its sales proposition by its target market was as uniformly strong as with Smart ATA. It seems that the fondest wish of service providers is to be able to stop telling their subscribers to keep their POTS lines for fax. And Smart ATA lets them do just that since it solves the late-T.38-re-Invite problem and the PCM-clock-sync problem that is often responsible for G.711 FoIP transactions failing.

And Smart ATA is also the only ATA with support for V.34.

To learn more about Smart ATA, visit the NetGen Communications (our sister company) Website, or call 770-449-7704 and press 1.

V.34 FoIP

So, what good is having the industry’s first V.34-capable analog telephone adapter (ATA), or gateway for that matter, since there are no other V.34-capable gateways to peer with? Well, aside from the obvious point that someone has to be first, there are some definite immediate benefits due to Smart ATA’s extended features.

All ATAs have station interfaces (FXS ports) to allow analog phones and faxes to connect to IP networks, but not all ATAs include office trunks (FXO) and the ability to connect IP fax servers to the PSTN.

As you know, not every enterprise has service providers available that offer reliable FoIP. But companies are reluctant to sink investment in TDM-only servers since an eventual move to IP will happen, the only question is when. For low-port-count (2-6 port) applications, Smart ATA is the perfect solution since, at $70 per port, it’s actually less than Commetrex’ MSP PSTN-interface boards, already the lowest-cost solution in the industry. And, with V.34 supported, the user gives up nothing to fax boards costing thousands. If you’re interested in Smart ATA’s unequalled functionality, download the user manual, or contact us at sales@commetrex.com or 1-770-449-7775, and press 1.

Introducing BladeWare Studio App Server

Consistent with Commetrex’ focus on the OEM, BladeWare Studio is a VXML 2.1 authoring tool that produces portable, server-independent VXML output. BladeWare Studio breaks the proprietary link between the VXML code generator and the app server, contrasting sharply with other VXML design tools that force you to publish to the vendor’s expensive server, even if it’s not a good match with your budget or needs. With BladeWare Studio, you can publish to any J2EE application server, such as JBOSS or Tomcat.

But this does not mean that Commetrex does not offer a server that will publish your VXML scripts. BladeWare Studio now includes the BladeWare Studio AppServer, so you can publish to a known server, easily validating your VXML scripts. Once that step is complete, you can publish to Java Server Pages (JSPs) for deployment to any J2EE-based application server, including BladeWare Studio AppServer.

Want to learn more? Give us a call at 770-449-7775 or email Mike Coffee today.

New! Improved! Our V.34 Fax Modem Just Got Better

Notice: extreme tech alert! Do not read this article unless you believe you might be interested in how we just improved the Commetrex V.34 fax modem.

Okay, we warned you…

In doing some work on our V.34 fax modem, we noticed that its local-carrier generation was noisier than it should be. A synchronous modem, such as those used in fax-image transfer, requires that the transmit signal be modulated by a carrier and that the receiver modem remove it. To do that requires the signal-processing software to have a local oscillator. In days of yore, this was an oscillator circuit; today it’s done in software.

Years ago when we developed our V.17 fax modem, we used a look-up table for sine and cosine generation to reduce processor loading. When the modulators and demodulators were adapted to V.34, the look-up tables remained. These served well enough until we improved other pieces of the modems and found that these tables were the remaining dominant source of noise in the transmitter and the receivers due to the oddball carrier frequencies required by the V.34 modem, such as 1829 Hz, and 1959 Hz. Because of this, the table values used had to be the closest available. While this basically works, the instantaneous errors of the sines and cosines can be larger than you might expect, in our case, up to 204 out of a range of 0 to 32,767.

We implemented a “cleaner” sine and cosine generation by moving to a modified Taylor series algorithm. The instantaneous error with the new algorithm is about +/- 6 out of 32,767, a big improvement, and enough to reduce signal noise in the transmitter and the receiver so that measured errors dropped by about 50%.

We are now updating all of our products, such as BladeWare and Smart ATA, that support V.34.

Want to learn more about our modems? Send a note to Bruce Adams, Director, Signal Processing Technologies, at badams@commetrex.com.

MSP Boards Will Fit In Your Server

Simply by adapting the entire Sangoma product line of PSTN telephony-interface boards to BladeWare, we went from no PSTN support to having the industry’s broadest product line, without qualification. We now offer 2-48 lines of analog, 1-8 E1/T1 trunks, robbed-bit, and ISDN PRI and BRI.

And here’s a big bonus: the boards are half-length and half-height, all in both PCI and PCI Express versions. This means they will fit in your server.

Get more info by calling 770-449-7775 or emailing us at sales@commetrex.com.