Technology

At Far South Networks we believe in building our products from proven technology foundations, combining innovative in house intellectual property with best-of-breed open offerings.

 

Ethernet Streaming Interconnect

Ethernet has become the universal interconnect in home, enterprise and carrier room. Its immense scalability, combined with its low cost and technical superiority, makes it the clear choice as the backbone for building scalable telephony systems. Far South Networks has developed a product range based on our unique Ethernet Streaming Interconnect (ESI) technology.

ESI eliminates the need for legacy platform-dependent and non-scalable interconnects such as PCI and USB. Systems built with ESI are based on low-cost, commodity servers and LAN components combined with our telephony adapters in a highly scalable, rack-based environment.

Even our smallest unit, Com.X1, uses an internal ESI link, and provides additional scalability via external Ethernet interfaces.

Unlike other network streaming architectures such as SIP, ESI carries telephony channels in native, multiplexed form, thereby minimizing latency and centralising the signalling and media processing functions on the host platform.

ESI carries the following telephony protocols between telephony adapters and host media processors:

  • Analog trunk and extension lines (FXO/FXS) with CAS
  • Primary Rate ISDN (PRI)
  • Basic Rate ISDN (BRI)
 

CommaSoC

At the heart of every Far South Networks Comma/Com.X product is a proprietary reprogrammable System on Chip (SoC) providing the real time telephony functions that cannot be handled reliably by commodity servers.

CommaSoC handles the following critical functions for all telephony ports:

  • Ethernet Streaming Interconnect to PCM conversion
  • Adaptive Echo Cancellation
  • Layer 1 assistance functions
  • Port monitoring
  • Timing adaptation

CommaSoC combines highly optimized Digital Signal Processing elements with a 32-bit RISC CPU to deliver ultra-reliable, real time audio processing and packet/circuit interworking. The core logic hardware is fully field upgradeable, providing extended lifetime and enhanced feature roadmap.

 

Hosted Ethernet Peripheral

Comma telephony adapters, including the embedded telephony modules in the Com.X range, are designed as hosted Ethernet peripherals. This means that the telephony modules do not store any configuration, or even their own application firmware. The configuration information and application code are stored on the host commodity server, or in the case of Com.X on the embedded server.

This architecture drastically reduces the commissioning and maintenance load, particularly in larger systems, by centralising all configuration on the host server.

 

Remote Operation

Far South Networks has developed a full-featured and easy to use Graphical User Interface that presents a rich client application in a standard web browser. We have build our web application using Google Web Toolkit to provide a high-level and interactive user view of the hardware and software that makes commissioning and maintaining complex PBX and Gateway systems simple and intuitive.

With CommaGUI, it is possible to install a minimally configured system on site and then complete the commissioning and maintain the system remotely over the Internet.

The software, firmware and upgradeable hardware (CommaSoC) that comprise an installed system are all distributed as versioned packages, based on the renowned Debian packaging system. Feature updates and improvements are accessible over the Internet from our public repository. This makes remote field upgrades simple, even over a large installed base.

 

Open Source

Comma and Com.X operating software is based on proven open source technology including the following:

  • Linux
    • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
    • CentOS ports also available
  • Asterisk
    • 1.4.22, 1.4.29
    • 1.6 (coming soon)
  • Other
    • FreePBX
    • MySQL
    • Java
    • Google Web Toolkit
    • Hibernate
    • Jetty