January 1999

Price: VAR pricing for unit one for the BICOM GEMINI Series: 2400D-T1: $3500.00; 2400D-2T1: $3995.00; 3000D-E1: $3750.00; 3000D-2E1: $4250.00.

RATINGS (0-5)
Installation 4.75
Documentation 3
Features 4
Operational Testing 4.5
Overall Grade A-

BICOM, Inc., was founded in 1988 to concentrate on improving DSP technology in developing CTI solutions. Now, BICOM is a manufacturer of DSP-based processing platforms for voice and fax applications. These hardware and software components provide the resources for developing a wide range of CTI applications. Their newest release, the BICOM 3000D-xE1 series, provides thirty voice or data channels with E1, T1, or ISDN termination. Also known as the Gemini Series, this family of high-density voice platforms uses eight of BICOM's latest DSPs. The Gemini Series contains both SCSA and MVIP on board, enabling developers to use products from multiple vendors to build CTI solutions incorporating capabilities such as voice processing, speech recognition, and text to speech. With onboard switching programs such as international call back, applications can be achieved smoothly and economically.

INSTALLATION
The installation of the Gemini board was fairly simple. In order to achieve a fully operational configuration, we needed two PCs with the Gemini boards installed. Half this work was accomplished for us, as we inherited a computer from BICOM's in-house demonstration with the board pre-loaded. For the other PC, BICOM simply gave us a fresh board, an installation guide, and a CD.

We opened the installation guide and followed the directions. Simply, we went into the labs and found a PC with a Pentium II 300 MHz processor and a PC in the lab running Windows NT 4.0 with 96 MB of RAM. We powered off the PC, removed the cover, and located an empty slot to install the board. We then powered up the PC and followed the software installation instructions that appeared. Through the ensuing prompts, we set the IRQ to 7. We were able to use the factory default DSP resources settings of D000 with offset 0000, and the default FED resource settings of D000 and offset 2000.

From here, we logged into Windows NT. In order to get the boards working, we needed to run the BICOM Firmware Loader, a utility that loads the BICOM configuration information and starts the BICOM drivers. In our particular case, the Firmware Loader downloaded one media board and one FED board. After this process finished, we were ready to examine the pieces of the application.

DOCUMENTATION
The extent of the documentation that we received was the Gemini-xE1 Installation guide, a fairly concise pamphlet that included a product overview, Gemini features and specifications, software architecture, and then finally the installation section. The first three sections were brief, providing general information and aimed more at acquainting the user with the board and its features.

The installation section provided instructions for a single-board installation in more detail. Some of the topics covered in this section included preparing the PC, the hardware interrupt definition and base address definition, both of which were under the configuration of the 3000D-xE1, and the installation of the board. A couple of figures and tables were also found in this section and provided a useful utility for configuring the jumper board and base address settings. Finally, there was a brief page at the end of the guide describing the board's diagnostic LEDs.

FEATURES
The Gemini series of boards contains thirty channels that can be used for either voice or digital fax with E1, T1, or ISDN E1 termination in a single-slot configuration. These boards, which use eight of BICOM's own DSPs, are stackable with up to eight boards per system. Resource sharing is done through an MVIP bus, though a SCSA bus is optional. All Gemini boards support general tone, DTMF, and multi-frequency tone detection and generation. These boards also sample sound at both 6 KHz and 8 KHz sampling rates (in a range from 300 Hz to 2600 Hz or 3400 Hz, respectively). In addition, the boards utilize multi-frequency R2 signaling. The audio digitization techniques used by the boards are as follows:

• ADPCM at 6 KHz for audio at 24 Kbps.
• ADPCM at 8 KHz for audio at 32 Kbps.
• A-law or m-law PCM at 6 KHz for audio at 48 Kbps.
• A-law or m-law PCM at 8 KHz for audio at 64 Kbps.

The Gemini series of boards comes with an excellent logging tool for helping programmers and developers troubleshoot their applications. Named the BICOM Spy, this utility allows the user to log events for different software modules on a configurable basis. The user can specify a filename for the log file, control the size of the file, and control the message priority for the logging tools. This last option simplifies the task of troubleshooting by providing or eliminating detail on a need-to-see basis. Therefore, when an error is known to be in a specific module, the user can eliminate detail to make the file more readable, or add to detail to capture all possible errors.

Other utilities provided with the Gemini boards include VariSpeed, which adjusts speed up to fifty percent in both directions, and SmartCall. The SmartCall progress monitor provides a number of fully programmable features including:

• A tone table editor.
• Learn tone module.
• Human detection voice recognition.
• Dial tone detection.
• Ring tone detection.
• Busy and record tone detection.
• Modem and fax tone detection.
• Intercept tone detection.
• Maximum number of tones detection.

OPERATIONAL TESTING
Much of the operational testing of the BICOM board was covered in our conference room with BICOM's engineers showing us the product. After a brief history of the company, we watched a sample application run across two PCs with Gemini series boards. Sitting between the two PCs was a Sage Instruments 930i Communications Test Set. The engineer launched the application that sent thirty simultaneous voice calls across the network, while listening to each channel on the Sage device. We also ran through this same procedure with fax as the transmitted medium. At the end of this run, we were able to view all thirty faxes on the receiving computer.

Afterwards, we took a tour of the different components in the BICOM menu. The first of these that we examined was NTDiag application, a graphical interface to the board resembling a large digital-phone set. From this application, all thirty channels on the board could be accessed for the purpose of running commands. Also in this brief tour was the BICOM Firmware Loader, which we needed to use during our installation before the other applications could be used. We also saw a couple of tools that ran in a DOS-window, the Kernel Mode Driver Spy, and the NTDebug utility.

The next application we inspected was the SmartCall progress Monitor. In this utility, we found some useful features. Among the most important was the ability to edit tone tables. Particularly, this feature allows developers to customize tones by changing the dual-tone on-times and off-times. There is also a Learn Tone feature found here, which allows developers to use the board to gather information about tones generated by other devices.

The last utility we examined was the Spy tool. There were two different components to the Spy Tool: one called the Spy File Viewer; the other the BICOM Spy Configuration. The viewer simply opens the logged text files created by the application. The configuration tool was much more interesting, as it encompassed a wide range of parameters not normally found with logging applications, such as Message Priority, Buffer Size, and Maximum File Size. We feel that this should be a very useful feature for developers and programmers in this field.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
The BICOM Gemini boards definitely measured up to our tests. One thing we felt that BICOM could do to improve their relationships with developers would be to supply some more sample code and applications for dissemination. We do know that BICOM spends a good deal of time aiding their partners, but we felt that providing more sample code would help them to make this process more efficient. In addition, the inclusion of a full manual on the CD that comes with the board would be a nice reference utility.

CONCLUSION
The BICOM board is a good solution for developers and programmers who wish to create voice and fax CTI applications. The Gemini series, being their latest release, incorporates the newest BICOM innovations in DSP technology, providing an efficient and cost-productive solution. In addition to efficiency, these boards are full-featured, allowing for the creation of rich applications. Developers will find these boards useful in deployments of up to eight boards per system at twenty-four or thirty channels per board. In addition to voice and fax messaging, the boards can be used in IVR systems, telemarketing and call centers, debit cards and call back systems, and many other applications. BICOM's Gemini series boards are set to make their contribution to the CTI market.