[Asterisk-Users] Which asterisk-friendly cards are fax-capable?

[Lee Howard]

Bob Goddard wrote:

>On Tuesday 11 Oct 2005 22:41, Lee Howard wrote:
>  
>
>>Tom Rymes wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Use the right tool for the job!!!
>>>      
>>>
>Use a hardware based DSP for faxing not software based.
>  
>

Why is a soft-DSP to be considered any less-capable than hardware ones?

The reason why I put IAXmodem together in the first place was because of 
a growing frustration that I've had with hardware chipsets and the lack 
of attention that the manufacturers generally afford to resolving 
fax-related bugs in their products.

There are some good-for-faxing hardware chipsets out there.  Namely the 
Lucent/Agere Venus chipset and most of the spectrum of chipsets from the 
RCV144 to the K56 from Rockwell/Conexant were good.  These two 
companies, however, appear to have "moved on" to other products.  
Getting DSP-related fixes for these chipsets (firmware updates dealing 
with DSP-related issues) is getting increasingly impossible and is bound 
to only get worse as manufacturers move farther and farther away from 
the less-lucrative fax market.  And as far as I've tested of other 
chipsets (notably Cirrus Logic/Ambient/Intel, TI/3Com, and ADI) they all 
leave things to be desired, and they cannot be reliably used in large 
fax deployments desiring a near-100% (very near) fax-handling success 
ratio (yes, if you're okay with a 95% success rate go ahead and use a 
USR modem for faxing).  As a fax server administrator it's very 
frustrating to hear people say "but it works with my fax machine" only 
to come to learn that the problem is related with the hardware chipset 
DSP and the best "workaround" that can be developed is not going to 
return results as well as that fax machine can.  And when there are no 
fax-reliable hardware chipsets out there to use... then what?

IAXmodem may not yet be as reliable as the Ageres or Conexant chipsets 
may be (it would surprise me to learn otherwise right now), but I think 
that with time it will improve, and my hope and goal is that it will 
become as reliable a DSP as any hardware chipset could be.

Lee.