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allows the transmission and reception
of faxes within T.30 and T.37 specifications as detailed below. Using
Prosody's Group 3 fax, a system can discriminate between incoming fax
or voice calls allowing an application to route the call to either fax
or speech resources. With Prosody media processing resource software
being available to download from software downloads at no extra cost,
this solution brings unmatched value per channel.
As the use of fax has proliferated, the demand for open computer telephony
(CT) based solutions has grown and the use of proprietary hardware
solutions is no longer a fixed expectation. Services like fax-on-demand
and fax broadcast have become basic business tools for many organisations
in different customer facing and business-to-business industry sectors.
This creates many market opportunities for developers and integrators.
With the flexibility of a fax option on intelligent media processing
resource cards like Prosody, dedicated fax cards become a thing of
the past, especially when the benefit of learning and developing with
a single, generic API is considered.
The firmware for Group 3 fax is available to download from software downloads
and is incorporated into the TiNG architecture . TiNG allows a developer
to choose multiple functions, within the capacities of each Prosody
DSP, to create the most cost effective communications solution. Up
to four DSPs are available on a single card, benefiting the developer
with a wide choice of functional permutations for building real time
CT solutions.
With TiNG, and using V.29, for example, a single DSP will support up
to 48 simultaneous fax transmission processes and with four DSPs, 192
can be achieved per card. Receiving faxes is more resource intensive
and up to 12 simultaneous processes can be achieved per DSP, giving a
maximum of 48 per card. Aculab provides a TiNG utility tool to assist
in calculating optimum feature mix combinations, including simultaneous
fax transmit and receive, per DSP.
The total number of simultaneous fax channels per system is governed
by the host PC's processing and memory capability, so channel count will
need calculating on a per system basis.
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Aculab's Group 3 fax software will provide for the transmission and
reception of Group 3 TIFF image files, monitoring of call progress
(incoming and outgoing) and call configuration capabilities.
Prosody
offers a TIFF image manipulation library, which allows the generation
of TIFF images from ASCII text input. An application is able
to control the selection and transmission of fax header and individual
pages. Control of page length and resolution is also provided
and blank, cover or text only pages can be created. A text insertion
capability (with support for multiple fonts) enables, for example,
page headers and footers to be included. In addition each page
can be optionally coded into multiple formats, which means the
capabilities of a remote machine can be matched without resorting
to on-the-fly image conversion.
On-ramp and off-ramp handling of
faxes to and from email, according to the T.37 simple mode specification,
is provided as a separate module. This gives the ability to send
and receive faxes via email using the SMTP protocol and to receive
emails from a server via the POP3 protocol.
Fax features are available as an extension of the Aculab generic
API, providing a consistent look and feel when developing with
Aculab digital network access or media processing resources .
A copy of the generic API for fax is available from technical
documents to allow developers a preview opportunity.
Images can be received or transmitted in TIFF format using the
following compression algorithms according to ITU-T specifications:
MH Modified Huffman data compression (ITU-T T.4 recommendation)
MR Modified Read data compression (ITU-T T.4 recommendation)
MMR Modified Modified Read data compression (ITU-T T.6 recommendation)
Aculab’s Group 3 fax software conforms to the following ITU-T
and IETF specifications:
V.21 300 bits/s for T.30 fax negotiation
V.17 7200, 9600, 12 000 and 14 400 bits/s fax transmit only
V.27ter 2400, 4800 bits/s
V.29 7200, 9600 bits/s
ECM (Error correction mode) transmission and reception supported
RFC2306 Group 3 TIFF. |
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