Idea Background

Legacy

For the last two decades, the only way to do voice/fax applications on a PC was through expensive specialized DSP based voice/fax boards made by one of several well-entrenched vendors. Those boards were handling all call control and media processing tasks.

Actually, it made perfect sense back then. Only the PSTN was able to carry voice calls and voice/fax boards provided the physical connection to it. On the other hand, x86 processors were orders of magnitude slower than necessary in order to do any serious real-time media processing task.

However, times are changing. Almost a decade ago the first VoIP products and services hit the marketplace and voice traffic started its shift from TDM to IP networks.

Suddenly, voice/fax applications were not necessary to attach directly to the PSTN. Actually, if the application needed to be future-proof, IP networks had become the right place to be. In due course, voice/fax boards started to lose one of their two market anchors, PSTN connectivity. Any generic VoIP Media gateway could do the job.

Recently, Moore's law did the rest. Commodity x86 processors became powerful enough for the purpose of handling media processing tasks. Voice/fax boards lost their only remaining market anchor, DSP based media processing.

Present

Almost all major voice/fax board vendors (Intel/Dialogic, Aculab, Brooktrout, Eicon, NMS) released or announced their own HMP, software only telephony solutions.

With the release of the Gridborg HMP product to the market, Uniqall was chronologically second only to Intel.

Uniqall was the first HMP vendor on the market with a product that runs within both the Linux and Windows environments and on both Intel and AMD processors. Support for additional operating systems and processor architectures will follow in subsequent releases.

Uniqall is the only HMP vendor in the market that doesn't have to defend hardware based revenues with the price of a software only solution. Therefore the Gridborg HMP is priced accordingly.

With its low cost structure, no hardware based revenues to lose, and its dedication to a software only solution, Uniqall is the best positioned vendor to lead the transition from hardware to software only solutions by providing the best products at extremely attractive pricing points.

The time had come for voice/fax boards to begin their long slow journey from the mainstream of the market. Where exactly, remains to be seen. No particular direction can be excluded yet, including the dinosaurs'  fate.

Future

While it is obvious that in the long run, the PSTN will cease to exist in its present form, and that what we call the PSTN today is going to be pure IP interconnection, it is also obvious that remains of it are going to be used here and there for decades from now.

From there, we may easily draw the conclusion that specialized hardware parts are going to be necessary in VoIP Media gateways on the intersection between the PSTN of today, and the one of tomorrow. There is nothing that can be done about it when a physical connection other than Ethernet is needed.

Besides that, it is very difficult to justify long term use of any other specialized telephony hardware for the purpose of providing services on the next-gen network.

The future is clearly in software only solutions that will be able to natively sit on IP networks (H.323, SIP, SS7 over IP, MGCP, MEGACO, Skinny, Skype, IAX, etc), interconnect with the PSTN of today through cheap generic VoIP Media gateways, and do all call control and media processing on the host processor (host media processing).

Such solutions should be both operating system and processor agnostic, and have a price that is a order of magnitude lower than the price of current expensive voice/fax boards.