Will it work?
The short answer: Yes!
The long answer: There seems to be no technical limitations preventing
us from implementing the DSP software needed on a Linux system to do it all
in software.
Needless to say, there is a lot of rather complicated software
needed and we only have limited resources and knowledge, but we think it is
possible to solve this problem through an "Open Source Software" project.
One argument against a software-only modem/fax that has circulated and
apparently gained some acceptance points out that the timing-critical nature
of a modem makes it very difficult, maybe even impossible to make it work.
Needless to say, nothing is impossible, as the existence of such software for
Win 95/98/NT demonstrates.
The fax-standards makes some allowances for latency, which is a godsend
as it reduces the need to respond immediately to an incomming
signal. A software-only solution with some latency can be viewed as a
fax-machine that seems to be a little more remote than it really is.
A satelite jump is aprox. 0.25 seconds, which is a long time compared to
the extra latency expected to be introduced by buffering in software.
With a slow or busy computer, the fax-algorithms could be expected to
respond too slowly or too sluggish to keep the connection running.
The project team has looked into this problem, and we can proudly announce
that the soft-realtime scheduler in any standard Linux kernel seems more
than able to solve this problem.
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