Features and benefits
	T.30 fax relay/termination and T.37 ‘store and forward’ protocols
	T.38 real-time fax over IP (FoIP) with T.30 to T.38 gateway function
	Automatic detection of fax calls
	Dynamic switching between fax and voice within a call
	Supports multiple page formats with unlimited length
	Header and footer formatting

Target applications
	Fax bureaux
	Contact and call centres
	Unified messaging
	Hosted IP-centric services
	IMS compliant media resource function (MRF)
	IMS compliant media gateway (MGW)

Aculab’s fax software allows the transmission and reception of faxes within T.30, T.37 and T.38 ITU-T specifications on the Prosody series of media processing platforms, as specified in this product bulletin.

Using Aculab’s software, a system can discriminate between incoming fax or voice calls, allowing an application to route the call to either fax or speech resources, ideal for unified messaging applications. With Aculab’s fax software available to download from Aculab’s website under a cost free licence, this solution brings unmatched value per channel for both fax over IP and Group 3 fax solutions.

Applications
From its invention in 1843 by the Scottish technician and clockmaker Alexander Bain, the use of fax has proliferated and the demand for integrated voice and fax solutions has grown. 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 boards like Prosody and Prosody X, dedicated fax boards have become a thing of the past, especially when the benefit of learning and developing with a single, consistent API is considered.

Feature summary
Aculab’s fax software provides for the transmission and reception of Group 3 TIFF image files, monitoring of call progress (incoming and outgoing) and call configuration capabilities.

The Prosody series 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.

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 software 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.

Programming interface
Fax features are available as an extension of Aculab’s API, providing a consistent look and feel when developing with Aculab digital network access or Prosody media processing resources . A copy of the API is available from Aculab’s website to allow developers a preview opportunity.

Image compression
Images can be received or transmitted in TIFF format using the following compression algorithms according to ITU-T specifications:

Group 3 fax specification conformance
Aculab’s Group 3 fax software conforms to the following ITU-T and IETF specifications:

These ITU-T data modems are also available to developers for use independently. See the Prosody TiNG data communications API guide, which is available from the technical documents page on Aculab’s website, for more details.

Fax software in TiNG architecture
The firmware for Group 3 fax and T.38 FoIP is available to download from Aculab’s website and is incorporated into the TiNG architecture. TiNG allows a developer to choose multiple functions to create the most cost effective communications solution.

While executed on DSP-based media platforms, the software allows significant solution performance increase as a result of off-loading a major part of the fax handling algorithms to be performed directly on a set of DSPs. Various firmware algorithms are loaded to the system DSPs separately, benefiting the developer with a wide choice of functional permutations for building real-time IP and circuit switched communication solutions.

Aculab provides a TiNG utility tool, which is accessible from the technical documents page of our website, to assist in calculating optimum feature mix combinations, including simultaneous fax transmit and receive, per DSP. Because the total number of simultaneous fax channels per system is governed by the host PC’s processing power as well as the DSP’s processing power and memory capability, the channel count will need calculating on a per system basis.

Supported products and performance

Notes:
¹. Preliminary figure

Operating system support
When operating on the DSP-based media processing platforms, the fax software is supported on the following operating systems:

Features and benefits
	Linux
	SPARC Solaris
	Windows XP/2000, Windows Server 2003

The software only, host media processing platform Prosody S, is currently supported under Windows XP/2000 and Windows Server 2003.

Related links: Product pages Prosody X PCI Prosody X cPCI Prosody cPCI Prosody PCI Media processing resources Product portfolio     Software downloads Media processing resources Conferencing Echo cancellation   Third party integration MRCP client for Loquendo, Nuance & Telisma   Protocols and approvals

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