Fax Portal

Commetrex, as the “Trusted Source for Fax Technology”^™ has become the leading worldwide supplier of fax and fax-related technologies to the telecommunications OEM and system integrator. Many of the finest names in communications are licensees of Commetrex’ fax technology. They chose Commetrex because it means they will base their product on the very finest field-proven technology.

Now, Commetrex has integrated its award-winning product and technology portfolio into an all-software telephony framework: BladeWare. BladeWare allows the enterprise and hosted-communications service provider OEM to avoid the dozens of developer-years needed to develop a comprehensive telephony framework. BladeWare allows you to cost-effectively develop applications where the underlying platform renders the network—IP or PSTN—or the transport—G.711 pass-through, T.38 fax relay, or traditional fax modems—transparent to the application. So, with BladeWare, you develop once and support any network or fax-transport type. Moreover, no proprietary hardware is required. Today, developers of enterprise systems must be able to take advantage of the power of today’s host processors, which double every 18 months while the MIPS required to process a fax media stream have remained constant, and, in the case of T.38, have actually gone down. In today’s market, business as usual with traditional “fax boards” just doesn’t fill the bill.

But just because you no longer need to bear the cost of of expensive fax boards, there are still applications that require PSTN interfaces, both analog and digital. To help you reduce costs there we offer the industry’s broadest product line of PSTN interfaces, our MSP product line.

Commetrex’ BladeWare™ supports your proprietary application through BladeWare’s developer’s API. But you can also choose from our ready-to-deploy applications: BladeWare Fax-to-Email Server, BladeWare Email-to-Fax Server, and BladeWare Fax Media Server.

If you are developing a proprietary fax server, an IP gateway, or network-based media server, Commetrex is the only fax-technology partner you will need. (We also have a growing VoIP-technology portfolio.) Commetrex’ Fax Modems, now available with V.34, in source- or object-code form, have 15 years of field-proven deployment. Quantitative testing shows they are superior to the most-popular modem chip. This modem technology and PortableT30™ are the basis of PowerFax for BladeWare, the software product that makes the MSP product line of PSTN PCI and PCI Express boards the industry’s most versatile and cost-effective “fax boards”, that are really just PSTN interfaces.

SIPfaxEngine simplifies the addition of Fax over IP (FoIP) in your office products and telephony servers. Designed for the OEM of fax-enabled devices and servers, SIPfaxEngine allows you to take advantage of the following feature/functionality benefits:

Seamless integration of SIP call control and fax technologies
Reduction of development costs
Decrease time-to-market
Increased ROI
Leverage the industry-leading fax technology

SIPfaxEngine provides the industry’s most-advanced core fax-technology bundle that OEMs need to simplify the addition of comprehensive FoIP support. It is a full-function SIP and fax-technology foundation for multi-function printers, media servers, fax terminals, or anything that needs to send and receive faxes in SIP networks.

Are you designing a fax gateway? You can license Commetrex’ PowerRelay™ with support for T.38 (Fax over IP), I.366.2 (Fax over ATM), and FRF.11.1 frame relay. Combine PowerRelay with Commetrex’ fax modems for a complete gateway solution, and rest assured that your product is based on the industry’s best and most up-to-date technology. Our T.38 fax relay now supports T.38 Version 3 with V.34 (Super G3 fax). And we’ve recently added Smart FoIP®, which dramatically reduces call-setup failures, as an option.

Concerned about T.38 interoperability? Commetrex is the T.38 interoperability leader. In January 2002, Commetrex announced the opening of its, T.38 Interop Lab which offered no-fee interoperability testing to any vendor with a fielded T.38-capable gateway. Since the Lab’s opening, over a dozen companies have completed testing. The T.38 Interop Lab has made PowerRelay and TerminatingT38^TM the industry’s interoperability standards.

TerminatingT38™ (available with T.38 V3 support) lets you combine service-platform and gateway functionality in the same carrier-class product. If you are a fax-server or media-server vendor you can readily add the ability to terminate IP-based fax alongside legacy PSTN terminating fax.

Another Commetrex innovation is Multi-Modal Terminating Fax^TM(MMTF). Enterprise platforms and network-based media servers must support fax regardless of the mode of transport (IP or PSTN) or the capability of an IP gateway (T.38 or G.711 pass-through). T.30 is the ITU standard used to terminate a fax, but what goes on between two T.30 endpoints can involve quite a range of technologies. The simplest is a straight PSTN connection, which only requires analog fax modems. But insert an IP transport in the middle and things begin to get complicated. T.38 is the ITU standard for gateways to handle real-time IP fax, but not all gateways support T.38. Instead, they simply encode the analog stream and pass it through the gateway as a G.711 stream. If you want your server to support every call, you want it to be able to terminate faxes from both types of gateways.

Fax Boards That Aren’t Fax Boards

We don’t actually sell fax boards or voice boards. With the power of today’s PCs, that just doesn’t make much sense since a 3-Gig dual-core PC comfortably runs 60 V.34 channels with plenty of headroom left for your application. Once you’ve paid for the PC, which you must have anyway, using the available MIPS costs you no more than leaving them idle and increases your ROI. So why not pay less than $200 per channel for your “fax board,” (software included) rather than $600?

Commetrex’ BladeWare HMP SIP- and PSTN-based telephony platform hosts Commetrex’ award-winning TerminatingT38, which we invented 13 years ago, our fax modems, which first shipped in 1994, and our integration of the entire line of Sangoma PSTN analog and digital telephony-interface boards. Think of these boards as fax boards that aren’t fax boards since all they do is provide the PSTN interface. The price of these boards reflects their bare-bones functionality. What’s more, with BladeWare you write just one resource adapter, which enables your application to address