Commetrex (News - Alert), inventor of T.38 fax termination now used in media servers everywhere, has announced its industry-first support for V.34 G.711 pass-through in its BladeWare HMP telephony platform.
The addition of V.34 to BladeWare will help the BladeWare users to elect in order to complete IP fax calls using V.34. This will prevent the users from forcing a fallback to V.17 speeds, which take twice as long to transmit a page.
Since there are only a few T.38 Version 3 V.34-capable gateways on the market, and none deployed in carrier networks, this becomes quite important. Many VoIP service providers are yet to support T.38 in any version. BladeWare, in these situations, delivers faxes with one-half the connection time of any server on the market.
Tom Ray (News - Alert), Commetrex' chief marketing officer stated, 'Here at Commetrex we use Cbeyond, an all-IP managed-services provider, for all of our communications over a clear-channel IP pipe to Cbeyond's (News - Alert) private metro network. But they don't support T.38. Instead, all faxes are handled with G.711 pass-through modems, including V.34, and they are virtually error-free. A BladeWare-based server is setup to use Cbeyond's SIP trunking. It's all software, all IP, and with V.34 support.'
According to Ray, many vendors maintain that G.711 pass-through fax does not work over carrier networks. While conceding that there are carrier networks that cannot reliably support fax, Commetrex maintains there are many that do, and to take full advantage of the higher speed requires Commetrex' BladeWare with V.34 support. There are also LAN-based applications where G.711 works well, such as when an IP PBX (News - Alert) without T.38 support is being used as the gateway between the PSTN and the enterprise fax server. There, the IP connection is over a high-performance LAN. No packet loss need be dealt with, and Commetrex' exclusive PCM-clock management software means even long G.711 faxes come through error-free.
In related news, Commetrex has announced a new technology called Smart FoIP that may make "IP-based fax directly connected to IP-carrier networks nearly as reliable as public switched telephone network or "PSTN" fax.
Deepika Mala is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Alice Straight