NetGen Channel Newsletter June 2014

Introducing the NetGen-New Rock Team…

Come See WROC at ITEXPO in August

Introducing the MX60

REST…OK, What is REST?

It’s Time to Implement RFC 6913

Introducing the NetGen-New Rock Team

You might have heard of Commetrex and its sister company, NetGen Communications, which produces and markets Smart ATA®, the full-function voice-fax ATA that removes the two most-vexing FoIP problems from your trouble tickets. Yes, you no longer have to be afraid of FoIP. You no longer have to tell your subscribers, “Keep your POTS for fax,” because Smart ATA has NetGen’s patent-pending Smart FoIP®. But you might not know that Smart ATA is jointly developed and produced by NetGen and New Rock Technologies (Shanghai). And, you can meet them both at ITEXPO Vegas 2014, booth 520.

Until today, Smart ATA and Smart ACS comprised NetGen’s product line, but now that’s changing. The two partners are introducing into the North American market more products that deliver the performance, features, and value that have established New Rock as one of the foremost vendors of enterprise IP telephony in China and Southeast Asia. Although New Rock’s product line includes the category-defining WROC wireless PBXs, IP PBXs, SBCs, IP phones, and gateways, we are starting with the MX gateway series, which duplicate the features of Smart ATA, but at much higher scale.

The MX series extends from the MX8 to the MX120 access gateways and to the MX100E trunking gateway, which supports four E1/T1s. The MX Series allows the channel partner to solve virtually any enterprise application problem due to its ability to support any modulo four-or-eight configuration of station or office interfaces, up to the maximum capacity of the chassis. For example, the MX60 goes from 16 FXS to 24 FXS and 24 FXO, in just about any combination.

But wait! There’s more! The MX has all the security, networking, management, and provisioning, features you’ve found on Smart ATA, plus the MX series now has Smart FoIP.

Visit us in booth 520 at ITEXPO Vegas this August and see Smart ATA, the MX gateways, and get a sneak peak at WROC, our new wireless and extensible PBX.

Come See WROC at ITEXPO in August

Introducing the MX60

The MX Series featuring Smart FoIP®, offers the MX8 for the low end, the MX120 and MX100E anchoring the high end, and the MX60 fitting perfectly meeting the needs of the mid-size application. Since these products have essentially the same code/features as Smart ATA1, they are full-featured voice-fax gateways providing a key differentiator: they provide strong support for station and office trunks, allowing our resellers to provide cost-effective solutions to a wide range of application problems.

Here are the MX60’s standard configurations:

To find out how the new MX Series can help you energize your sales channel and extend the solutions available to your customers, please call John Sennott, NetGen’s Director, Channel Marketing, at 770-449-7775 X320.
1 Not applicable to the MX100E trunking gateway

REST…OK, What is REST?

Several of our new products have an open API in the REST architectural style to allow the channel/you to solve unique application problems. Okay, but what is REST? Well, the short answer is it is an acronym for “Representational State Transfer,” a software architecture used in implementing Web services. According to Wikipedia, REST is a lightweight alternative to other protocols that support Web services, such as SOAP and WSDL. This API supports any application that can be implemented through Web services, either pre-existing, such as Google’s speech recognition, or a Web service you offer. Joining you and your customer together in a synergistic relationship.

Let’s discuss how the extensibility of our new products gives you differentiability and the recurring income of offering a managed service. Shoot us an email at marketing@netgencommunications.com

It’s Time to Implement RFC 6913

After much testing over a three-year period, the SIP and i3 Forums found that using the open Internet for SIP- and T.38-based FoIP calls delivered PSTN-like success rates, but when carriers were used (All of the i3 Forum members are carriers.) to route FoIP calls using their SS7/ISUP-based least-cost routing-as-usual, success rates dropped to just 50% for international calls. So, as reported last year on the i3Forum website, the thing to do to bring FoIP success rates up to where they need to be is to approximate the open Internet with carrier-routed FoIP calls. This problem is no different from HD voice, which requires that the carriers route HD voice calls over an all-IP route or else you lose the HD part of HD voice.

So, the call’s route should not include any TDM segments except for ingress and egress. But how is that done when (in T.38 Version 0) the off-ramp/called gateway is responsible for issuing a SIP reINVITE to T.38 based on detecting fax tones from the called terminal? Obviously, by that time the call has been routed to the off-ramp gateway and the called endpoint, it’s too late to make routing decisions. What to do?

The SIP Forum submitted a draft proposal (which has been accepted) to the IETF to extend RFC 3840 by adding a new media-feature tag “+SIP.FAX” to inform the call-routing entity that the call will likely be a fax. The submittal was accepted in March 2013 as RFC 6913. RFC 6913 has the potential to take FoIP to the point where subscribers and their service providers are unaware of the differences between PSTN and FoIP.

From section 8 of the document:

This document is a result of the unique cooperation between the SIP Forum and the i3 Forum, which embarked on a groundbreaking international test program for FoIP to improve the interoperability and reliability of fax communications over IP networks, especially tandem networks. The authors would like to acknowledge the effort and dedication of all the members of the Fax-over-IP (FoIP) Task Group in the SIP Forum and the communications carriers of the I3 Forum who contributed to this global effort.

The configuration of gateways, ATAs, and servers would need to be extended to allow a connected fax terminal to be configured as such, enabling the call-management software to add the SIP.Fax=true tag to the INVITE’s contact header. Service-provider and carrier routing entities that support RFC6913 would then be able to select a FoIP-qualified route for the call, possibly an over-to-top IP carrier. Based on the testing as reported, that’s all it would take to make FoIP solid in carrier networks.

There are other complementary ways to know when to give a call the FoIP treatment. The ITSP can allow subscribers to designate a number as a fax terminal, so any call originating there would be routed as above. And, it can be done heuristically: if fax calls keep originating from a particular number, the service provider would just declare it a fax number.

So, all you ITSPs, what do you think? Is this feasible? Will the fax-server and access-gateway people add RFC 6913 support? Then, with FoIP declared in the SIP header, can we get the access providers and carriers to do the right thing and route such calls over FoIP-friendly routes? (We’ve added it to Smart ATA’s July release and Commetrex will be adding it to BladeWare later this year.)

Let’s talk about RFC6913. Give Mike Coffee a call at 770-449-7704 and press 1.