Commetrex’ CEO, Mike Coffee, was recently interviewed by TMC’s Erik Linask and shared his insights on the future of IP Fax and Commetrex’ critical role in making FoIP a reality. That interview is featured on TMCnet.com.
Check out Mike’s CEO Commentary to learn how “We Make FoIP Work!” And there’s more information on his blog, Mike’s Musings.
Join Commetrex at ITEXPO West, the premier show for the telecom industry, at the LA Convention Center, October 4-6. If you are planning to attend the show, it only makes sense to make Commetrex’ booth #407 a must-see destination. You will learn about BladeWare’s many new features, including its’ high-function voice features.
We believe it will be the best telecom-industry conference in years; after all, we’ll be exhibiting there to show you how we are moving T.38 from Phase I to Phase II with “Smart FoIP”. In addition to the latest developments in fax technology, you can bone up on SIP trunking, smart grid, cloud-based telephony, and a whole bunch more on any of the several conference tracks. So, pack your bags.
At the Commetrex booth, you will learn more about how our value-adding fax server and voice server applications can improve your company’s bottom line. Our ready-to-deploy BladeWare Fax Media Server, Fax2Email, and Email2Fax, are load-and-go applications for OEMs, service providers, and the enterprise. In addition to the BladeWareVXi VoiceXML interpreter, we offer BladeWareStudio, a cost-effective, easy-to-use VoiceXML application-creation tool designed specifically for OEMs. These offerings are key components of our BladeWare voice initiative, which includes our pending announcement of voice support in BladeWare HMP.
Oh, yes, you won’t want to miss Commetrex’ CEO, Mike Coffee, who will update you on the joint testing being done by the SIP Forum FoIP Task Group and the i3 Forum in the fax session on Wednesday afternoon (10/6) at 2:45. The session is titled “The IP Migration Isn’t Done Until You FoIP Yourself” (B-13). The SIP Forum-i3 Forum testing is designed to give us the performance information needed for the global IP-telephony infrastructure to support real-time fax. Marc Robins, managing director of the SIP Forum, will moderate.
Looking for a VIP pass? Click here. By the way, there are only 10 hours of exhibit-hall time scheduled. So, if you have questions regarding BladeWare, licensing fax or telephony technologies (we have a great G168 LEC, or any aspect of FoIP, you might want to schedule a meeting. Just contact Tom Ray at 770-407-6025 or send him an e-mail at tray@commetrex.com.
We look forward to seeing you in Los Angeles, and to welcoming you to ITEXPO West.
As the industry leader in fax-technology development and innovation, Commetrex has much to gain from the broad deployment of FoIP, as does the entire industry. After all, many ATAs, gateways, and media servers are based on Commetrex fax technology. But there are enough problems in carrier-based FoIP deployments to slow the rate of adoption in wide-area applications, so we’re doing everything we can to improve the results. Better results means more demand; more demand means higher sales. Our recently announced Smart FoIP and participation in the SIP Forum’s FoIP Task Group are good examples. But there’s more.
We are doing extensive testing with cooperating service providers and carriers, such as Packet8, Cbeyond, Teliax, Intelemedia, Level(3), and Global Crossing. We will be reporting our results and progress from time to time, but we have some interesting results to post now.
Cbeyond is our service provider. Although their network is all-IP, they don’t support T.38. Resisting the urge to comment on the irony of that, we can report that there doesn’t seem to be a problem T.38 needs to solve since the G.711 pass-through faxes we receive rarely have any image errors. We turned off ECM to see what effect it has and notice one or two correctable errors every 40 pages or so.
To learn more about how BladeWare’s support of both T.38 and G.711 pass-through fax can improve your transaction success rate, give us a call: 1-770-449-7775 Press 1, or e-mail us at sales@commetrex.com.
Finally, after talking about it for over half a year, we’re doing it. “Smart FoIP” will be available on BladeWare in a few weeks to give you outbound-fax success rates on a par with PSTN fax. Now, your customers can take full advantage of the economies offered by IP networks in mission-critical applications.
You still have to carefully qualify your carriers, but for national or even international coverage, a call can transit several networks, with some of them being TDM networks, so signaling times can add up. This means that the T.38 re-Invite can arrive well after the two endpoint fax terminals have entered into negotiations in G.711 pass-through mode. Once that happens, accepting a re-Invite to T.38 can cause the fax session to fail. But not with Smart FoIP, which makes accepting a T.38 re-Invite highly intelligent.
In addition to BladeWare, we’ve also developed a version of Smart FoIP for our T.38 fax relay licensees. It not only includes the patent-applied-for Smart FoIP technology, it encapsulates all of the logic required to support V.34 in a T.38 version 3 gateway. We make it easy for our customers to get their product to market, then, we make it easy to keep it there.
Interested in FoIP, have a question or a problem to solve? Shoot us an e-mail at sales@commetrex.com. You can also visit us at ITEXPO West in LA, October 4-6. Come by booth #407 to see how “We Make FoIP Work!”.
There’re not many V.34-capable gateways out there, and only one V.34-capable FoIP fax server. This is so despite the fact that over half of the machines installed in the last five years support V.34. So, what gives?
Well, for one thing (and trust us when we say this) it’s not simple to implement. And another is that, compared with V.17, it’s a resource hog, both MIPS and RAM, which can give an embedded-system designer pause. Then, there’s the added complexity of handling V.34 in SIP signaling. And, it’s still heavily encumbered with patents. Lot’s of moving parts.
But we’ve stolen a march on our competitors and now have done it all. BladeWare is shipping with T.38 version 3 with V.34, G.711 pass-through IP fax with V.34, and V.34 in PSTN applications on all the Sangoma telephony boards. But with some HMP servers only supporting 60 or 120 ports of T.38, which is easy on the MIPS, what kind of capacity can you get with V.34 on BladeWare? Well, the answer is plenty.
Over the years we’ve been able to do a pretty good job of optimizing our ANSI-C-coded fax modems, so our V.34 got off to a good start. Then, Moore’s law and multi-core processors to the rescue! It turns out that our modems just love multi-core architectures. Both Linux and Windows do a fine job of putting the modems on one core, where they appear to fit into cache and just rip. The other core in a dual-core machine takes care of the application and file I/O, which is an important aspect of any fax application.
Here’s what we see: On a dual-core 3-GHz PC we can run 60 V.34 transmits sending to 60 V.34 receive channels and only use 30% of the computer’s MIPS. That’s 120 channels!
And, with the Sangoma digital boards supporting up to 8 spans in one PCI or PCI Express slot, who needs expensive fax boards? Address the entire market: analog station and office (1-48 ports in one PCI Express slot), ISDN PRI (1-8 spans) and ISDN BRI (1-24 D channels/2-48 B channels).
Incredulous? Give Mike Coffee a call at 1-770-407-6021 and tell him why.
Mike Morris, Director, Platform Development, is responsible for all system-level product development, including BladWare and SIPfaxEngine. Mike’s 32-year software-engineering career ideally prepares him for this position as the scope of his experience spans driver development to the API and to user-level applications.
Former VP, Corporate Development; General Counsel at Voxeo Corporation, is an advisor to Commetrex. Mr. Ivey has founded four startups, and his business plans/pitches have raised more than $71 million during the last ten years from VCs like Crosspoint and Mayfield.
VP & GM, Premiere Global Services is an advisor to Commetrex. He was previously President of Vocalocity LLC, a technology leader in the open systems speech technology market.
Bob Cooke is President of R.W. Cooke & Associates, an international petrochemical brokerage. Prior to this, he spent 29 years with E.I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company, holding senior positions in manufacturing and international marketing. Mr. Cooke holds a degree in mathematics from Florida State University.
Bruce Adams, Director, Signal Processing Technologies, brings an 18-year career in signal-processing and telephony-systems development to Commetrex. During his 8-year Principal Engineer assignment at Hayes Microcomputer, he completed his PhD EE coursework at Georgia Tech. Subsequently, he was Chief Executive Officer and GM at Signals+Software prior to joining Commetrex. He has also served as rapporteur on numerous ITU committees.
Cliff Schornak, CTO, Commetrex’ co-founder, was president of Systems By Design, a telecommunications design consultancy firm. Prior to this he was a senior researcher at Digital Communications Associates and the VP, Engineering at Innovative Technology, Inc. (ITI). Schornak holds master’s degrees in computer science from Georgia Tech, business and finance from George Washington, and undergraduate degrees in math and physics from Marycrest College.
Mike Coffee, President & CEO, prior to founding Commetrex, was VP, Marketing & Sales, with Natural MicroSystems, where he brought NMS into the computer-telephony market and introduced the idea for MVIP, the industry standard that propelled NMS into the market’s technology-leadership position. Prior to NMS, he served as VP and chief marketing executive at Innovative Technology, a digital-media technology developer, and Autodynamics, a worldwide marketer of process-plant simulators. Mr. Coffee holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech.
