The Outlook | September 2017

OpenMMTF Leads The Way

Commetrex has developed fax technologies serving the telecom-equipment developer for over two decades, resulting in a rich library of major system components:

PortableT30® (P30) and the Fax Modem Bundle provide PSTN fax termination.

PowerRelay for T.38 implements the ITU recommendation for real-time IP fax. And TerminatingT38™ combines P30 and PowerRelay to support real-time terminating fax on IP media servers.

Multi-Modal Terminating Fax (MMTF) is an integration of all of these major system components to create a system that allows a media server to terminate faxes from PSTN-IP gateways supporting either T.38 or G.711 pass-through for fax transmissions.

MMTF was the reference standard in the T.38 Interoperability Lab in 2002-2004, and is still widely considered to be the industry’s T.38 benchmark standard to this day.

Learn How to Integrate MMTF today!

PjSIP For Call Control

In the May issue of The Commetrex Outlook, we announced SIPfaxEngine, licensed technology that integrates SIP call control and Commetrex’ industry-best Multi-Modal Terminating Fax (MMTF) to form the technology core of a highly scalable and robust fax server. After much study, we decided to use pjSIP from Teluu and purchased a commercial license for this widely deployed SIP and communications package. We are very pleased with this open-source product.

Since 2005, pjSIP has been developed, maintained, and supported by the same core team; it is compact, and has an excellent reputation for stability and scope. Our license included 12 months of support, but we have only asked Teluu one question in 10 months.

Our initial release of SIPfaxEngine will use pjSIP as a fax-server call-control resource. But OEMs will be able to benefit from our choice and use any of the myriad features included in the package. For example:

SIP Capabilities

Extend Your Media Support

OpenMedia® is also used in SIPfaxEngine.

OpenMedia is Commetrex’ media-processing framework that separates signal-processing software from the underlying hardware, promoting portability and processor independence. Signal processing is isolated from media-specific control, and media control is isolated from the client application. This means servers and gateways that use OpenMedia can share code, use heterogeneous processors, and enjoy the productivity benefits of skill-set separation.

We use OpenMedia in all of our products that support call-stream media processing. But every so often we catch an OEM at just the right moment in a development schedule where he is looking for media technologies and a framework to support them. But it’s rare. Some OEMs have their own proprietary framework. Others prefer to develop their own.
And, although the media-processing framework is a major system component, some just overlook the need in the early stages of project planning. But, for an engineer willing to consider ways to shorten time-to-market and lower costs by licensing outside software, OpenMedia is a sure bet.

Media-processing is done by media-stream transforms (MSTs). Obviously, we encourage the use of our off-the-shelf MSTs, but it’s easy to develop your own. One customer needed to deliver hundreds of proprietary modems. They developed and debugged them using host-based OpenMedia and then moved the code to his embedded product. And it just worked! In spite of our marketing of OpenMedia’s location independence, we were all amazed.

Now we are using OpenMedia as the media-processing framework for our recently announced SIPfaxEngine, making extending its functionality a snap for the OEM user.