Posted: 9/6/2011 12:30:02 AM EDT
I have a idea that I need some help with. I won't get into it too much b/c I don't want to give away my awesome idea  but..
Is it possible to have a "software" modem. Not a piece of hardware, but a program to connect, recieve and send information to a modem..like a fax machine or a old modem? Not looking for a "softmodem" as that is still a piece of hardware. |
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Quoted: I have a idea that I need some help with. I won't get into it too much b/c I don't want to give away my awesome idea but..Is it possible to have a "software" modem. Not a piece of hardware, but a program to connect, recieve and send information to a modem..like a fax machine or a old modem? Not looking for a "softmodem" as that is still a piece of hardware. wait, wat? You want a software-emulated modem to talk to another modem over POTS? So confused...  |
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How about a smart phone? Say a app that uses the phone as a dialer? A smart phone without a service contract? If you have a service contract, the smartphone (and even dumb phones with USB) already are a 'modem.' E.g. on AT&T you just dial *99# through dialup networking and viola, connected to internet via 3g/4g you are. |
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I have a idea that I need some help with. I won't get into it too much b/c I don't want to give away my awesome idea but..
Is it possible to have a "software" modem. Not a piece of hardware, but a program to connect, recieve and send information to a modem..like a fax machine or a old modem? Not looking for a "softmodem" as that is still a piece of hardware. wait, wat? You want a software-emulated modem to talk to another modem over POTS? So confused...
Yes thats what I want Except I want it not in a computer but in a cell phone. |
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Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: I have a idea that I need some help with. I won't get into it too much b/c I don't want to give away my awesome idea but..Is it possible to have a "software" modem. Not a piece of hardware, but a program to connect, recieve and send information to a modem..like a fax machine or a old modem? Not looking for a "softmodem" as that is still a piece of hardware. wait, wat? You want a software-emulated modem to talk to another modem over POTS? So confused... Yes thats what I want Except I want it not in a computer but in a cell phone. You propose to take some digital content, use a modem emulator app on a cellphone to encode it into an analog carrier signal, that then gets re-encoded and compressed using a lossy audio codec into digital form by the phone/service provider, finally making its way to the modem/fax on the other side? Not going to happen. It's a Rube-Goldberg scenario. |
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I have a idea that I need some help with. I won't get into it too much b/c I don't want to give away my awesome idea but..
Is it possible to have a "software" modem. Not a piece of hardware, but a program to connect, recieve and send information to a modem..like a fax machine or a old modem? Not looking for a "softmodem" as that is still a piece of hardware. wait, wat? You want a software-emulated modem to talk to another modem over POTS? So confused...
Yes thats what I want Except I want it not in a computer but in a cell phone. You propose to take some digital content, use a modem emulator app on a cellphone to encode it into an analog carrier signal, that then gets re-encoded and compressed using a lossy audio codec into digital form by the phone/service provider, finally making its way to the modem/fax on the other side? Not going to happen. It's a Rube-Goldberg scenario. Well crap. What I want is a app that will fax files (.doc, .docx, .pdf) from your cellphone to a fax machine without having to go through a web service. One single app. Go in, select a file, type in the fax number and boom. I refuse to believe this is impossible,
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I have a idea that I need some help with. I won't get into it too much b/c I don't want to give away my awesome idea but..
Is it possible to have a "software" modem. Not a piece of hardware, but a program to connect, recieve and send information to a modem..like a fax machine or a old modem? Not looking for a "softmodem" as that is still a piece of hardware. wait, wat? You want a software-emulated modem to talk to another modem over POTS? So confused...
Yes thats what I want Except I want it not in a computer but in a cell phone. You propose to take some digital content, use a modem emulator app on a cellphone to encode it into an analog carrier signal, that then gets re-encoded and compressed using a lossy audio codec into digital form by the phone/service provider, finally making its way to the modem/fax on the other side? Not going to happen. It's a Rube-Goldberg scenario. Well crap. What I want is a app that will fax files (.doc, .docx, .pdf) from your cellphone to a fax machine without having to go through a web service. One single app. Go in, select a file, type in the fax number and boom. I refuse to believe this is impossible,
It's not impossible, you're just reinventing the app (eFax) that you don't want to use. You can do it, but you're going to need a server somewhere that *does* have a faxmodem, to actually send the fax. Otherwise, yes, pipe dream. There isn't a faxmodem in your smartphone. You could always petition HTC, Motorola, etc. to add one; then it would just be a fax machine itself, without the scanner. |
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I have a idea that I need some help with. I won't get into it too much b/c I don't want to give away my awesome idea but..
Is it possible to have a "software" modem. Not a piece of hardware, but a program to connect, recieve and send information to a modem..like a fax machine or a old modem? Not looking for a "softmodem" as that is still a piece of hardware. wait, wat? You want a software-emulated modem to talk to another modem over POTS? So confused...
Yes thats what I want Except I want it not in a computer but in a cell phone. You propose to take some digital content, use a modem emulator app on a cellphone to encode it into an analog carrier signal, that then gets re-encoded and compressed using a lossy audio codec into digital form by the phone/service provider, finally making its way to the modem/fax on the other side? Not going to happen. It's a Rube-Goldberg scenario. Well crap. What I want is a app that will fax files (.doc, .docx, .pdf) from your cellphone to a fax machine without having to go through a web service. One single app. Go in, select a file, type in the fax number and boom. I refuse to believe this is impossible,
It's not impossible, you're just reinventing the app (eFax) that you don't want to use. You can do it, but you're going to need a server somewhere that *does* have a faxmodem, to actually send the fax. Otherwise, yes, pipe dream. There isn't a faxmodem in your smartphone. You could always petition HTC, Motorola, etc. to add one; then it would just be a fax machine itself, without the scanner. Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? |
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Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? Do any of the smartphones have that kind of capability (tone generation + playback over the line + 'tapping' the line, pseudo half-duplex)? The app would have to be pretty tightly coded; you'd need realtime ability to sync up with the remote system and then do the encoding and decoding without some other app bogging the cpu down and screwing up the communication. |
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I have a idea that I need some help with. I won't get into it too much b/c I don't want to give away my awesome idea but..
Is it possible to have a "software" modem. Not a piece of hardware, but a program to connect, recieve and send information to a modem..like a fax machine or a old modem? Not looking for a "softmodem" as that is still a piece of hardware. wait, wat? You want a software-emulated modem to talk to another modem over POTS? So confused...
Yes thats what I want Except I want it not in a computer but in a cell phone. You propose to take some digital content, use a modem emulator app on a cellphone to encode it into an analog carrier signal, that then gets re-encoded and compressed using a lossy audio codec into digital form by the phone/service provider, finally making its way to the modem/fax on the other side? Not going to happen. It's a Rube-Goldberg scenario. Well crap. What I want is a app that will fax files (.doc, .docx, .pdf) from your cellphone to a fax machine without having to go through a web service. One single app. Go in, select a file, type in the fax number and boom. I refuse to believe this is impossible,
It's not impossible, you're just reinventing the app (eFax) that you don't want to use. You can do it, but you're going to need a server somewhere that *does* have a faxmodem, to actually send the fax. Otherwise, yes, pipe dream. There isn't a faxmodem in your smartphone. You could always petition HTC, Motorola, etc. to add one; then it would just be a fax machine itself, without the scanner. Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? It might be doable. I use my soundcard as a ham radio packet modem at 2400 baud. I also use SmartPropoPlus to recieve PPM signals from my RC transmitter. A group 3 fax needs a min of 14.4 kbit/s. I don't know if a sound card could to that. Even if it did, you would still need a little hardware like an opto-isolator and the RJ-11 female connector. |
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Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? My first guess would be an extremely low baud rate due to bandwidth limitations and compression artifacts. However, it has been years since I looked very closely at any of that, so could very well be wrong. |
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Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? Do any of the smartphones have that kind of capability (tone generation + playback over the line + 'tapping' the line, pseudo half-duplex)? The app would have to be pretty tightly coded; you'd need realtime ability to sync up with the remote system and then do the encoding and decoding without some other app bogging the cpu down and screwing up the communication. I would think so, though it may not be in the SDK. And yes, it would be a challenge to write, but I would think possinle. |
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Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? Do any of the smartphones have that kind of capability (tone generation + playback over the line + 'tapping' the line, pseudo half-duplex)? The app would have to be pretty tightly coded; you'd need realtime ability to sync up with the remote system and then do the encoding and decoding without some other app bogging the cpu down and screwing up the communication. I would think so, though it may not be in the SDK. And yes, it would be a challenge to write, but I would think possinle. I'll pay you and/or share profits. 
I started to try and think it through but the last language I used was Turbo Pascal 
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Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? Do any of the smartphones have that kind of capability (tone generation + playback over the line + 'tapping' the line, pseudo half-duplex)? The app would have to be pretty tightly coded; you'd need realtime ability to sync up with the remote system and then do the encoding and decoding without some other app bogging the cpu down and screwing up the communication. I would think so, though it may not be in the SDK. And yes, it would be a challenge to write, but I would think possinle. I'll pay you and/or share profits.
I started to try and think it through but the last language I used was Turbo Pascal java isn't too bad, but you're going to have to write at least part of it in C. |
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A software modem... yes, and no.
When you are talking about a modem, you are always talking about including either transducers (speakers/microphones) or level-shifters (i.e., TTL<->RS232 levels, or TTL<->POTS levels), which have to be done in hardware. However, once you have that small bit covered, yes, you can generally do everything else in software, provided you have enough CPU cycles... |
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Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? Do any of the smartphones have that kind of capability (tone generation + playback over the line + 'tapping' the line, pseudo half-duplex)? The app would have to be pretty tightly coded; you'd need realtime ability to sync up with the remote system and then do the encoding and decoding without some other app bogging the cpu down and screwing up the communication. I would think so, though it may not be in the SDK. And yes, it would be a challenge to write, but I would think possinle. Fax transmissions are what, 14.4K? Softmodems were doing faxes on phone lines when CPU were amazingly pathetic. Smartphones, with the new GHz CPUs (even dual-core GHz!) should be able to do it perfectly well, provided the OS and/or abstraction layers aren't completely pathetic. After all, the phones run Flash, and that is more CPU-intensive than a soft modem. I've never seen a soft modem clobber an entire 3GHz CPU core.
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Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? Do any of the smartphones have that kind of capability (tone generation + playback over the line + 'tapping' the line, pseudo half-duplex)? The app would have to be pretty tightly coded; you'd need realtime ability to sync up with the remote system and then do the encoding and decoding without some other app bogging the cpu down and screwing up the communication. I would think so, though it may not be in the SDK. And yes, it would be a challenge to write, but I would think possinle. Fax transmissions are what, 14.4K? Softmodems were doing faxes on phone lines when CPU were amazingly pathetic. Smartphones, with the new GHz CPUs (even dual-core GHz!) should be able to do it perfectly well, provided the OS and/or abstraction layers aren't completely pathetic. After all, the phones run Flash, and that is more CPU-intensive than a soft modem. I've never seen a soft modem clobber an entire 3GHz CPU core. To implement a softmodem in a smartphone you're going to need... 1. A driver. This is the only way to reliably generate the clocks the modem is going to need. A user-space app on a multi-process OS isn't going to do it. 2. Ability to dial the phone. 3. Ability to send raw data, in the form of sounds, to the phone in realtime. 4. Ability to 'tap' the incoming sounds from the phone, in realtime, without also tapping the outgoing sound. 5. Ability to read (at least) files on the phone. 6. Muting the microphone (at least) without interfering with #3. I find it unlikely that most smartphones are capable of #3 and #4. The other parts might all be there, except #1 of course, which you'll have to write and then get into the phone somehow. This will have to be done in an officially supported way if you plan to market this app; people aren't going to root their phones and void warranties just to send a fax. There's a lot more to it than just uttering "softmodem" and that's it. Softmodems all still had dedicated hardware to talk to, drivers, and users that were comfortable installing both. |
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Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? Do any of the smartphones have that kind of capability (tone generation + playback over the line + 'tapping' the line, pseudo half-duplex)? The app would have to be pretty tightly coded; you'd need realtime ability to sync up with the remote system and then do the encoding and decoding without some other app bogging the cpu down and screwing up the communication. I would think so, though it may not be in the SDK. And yes, it would be a challenge to write, but I would think possinle. Fax transmissions are what, 14.4K? Softmodems were doing faxes on phone lines when CPU were amazingly pathetic. Smartphones, with the new GHz CPUs (even dual-core GHz!) should be able to do it perfectly well, provided the OS and/or abstraction layers aren't completely pathetic. After all, the phones run Flash, and that is more CPU-intensive than a soft modem. I've never seen a soft modem clobber an entire 3GHz CPU core. To implement a softmodem in a smartphone you're going to need... 1. A driver. This is the only way to reliably generate the clocks the modem is going to need. A user-space app on a multi-process OS isn't going to do it. 2. Ability to dial the phone. 3. Ability to send raw data, in the form of sounds, to the phone in realtime. 4. Ability to 'tap' the incoming sounds from the phone, in realtime, without also tapping the outgoing sound. 5. Ability to read (at least) files on the phone. 6. Muting the microphone (at least) without interfering with #3. I find it unlikely that most smartphones are capable of #3 and #4. The other parts might all be there, except #1 of course, which you'll have to write and then get into the phone somehow. This will have to be done in an officially supported way if you plan to market this app; people aren't going to root their phones and void warranties just to send a fax. There's a lot more to it than just uttering "softmodem" and that's it. Softmodems all still had dedicated hardware to talk to, drivers, and users that were comfortable installing both. If you can write #1, then 3 and 4 follow. If you can't, you're fucked. The more I think about this, the less I believe that a driver that's close enough to the hardware can be written, at least not in an officially supported way. You could probably do it on one of the openmoko phones, but that project never really got off the ground. I don't think you can get deep enough with Android, and certainly not with the iphone. |
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Why couldn't you generate the correct sounds on the line to send a fax directly from a cell phone? an app should be able to do it, right? Do any of the smartphones have that kind of capability (tone generation + playback over the line + 'tapping' the line, pseudo half-duplex)? The app would have to be pretty tightly coded; you'd need realtime ability to sync up with the remote system and then do the encoding and decoding without some other app bogging the cpu down and screwing up the communication. I would think so, though it may not be in the SDK. And yes, it would be a challenge to write, but I would think possinle. Fax transmissions are what, 14.4K? Softmodems were doing faxes on phone lines when CPU were amazingly pathetic. Smartphones, with the new GHz CPUs (even dual-core GHz!) should be able to do it perfectly well, provided the OS and/or abstraction layers aren't completely pathetic. After all, the phones run Flash, and that is more CPU-intensive than a soft modem. I've never seen a soft modem clobber an entire 3GHz CPU core. To implement a softmodem in a smartphone you're going to need... 1. A driver. This is the only way to reliably generate the clocks the modem is going to need. A user-space app on a multi-process OS isn't going to do it. 2. Ability to dial the phone. 3. Ability to send raw data, in the form of sounds, to the phone in realtime. 4. Ability to 'tap' the incoming sounds from the phone, in realtime, without also tapping the outgoing sound. 5. Ability to read (at least) files on the phone. 6. Muting the microphone (at least) without interfering with #3. I find it unlikely that most smartphones are capable of #3 and #4. The other parts might all be there, except #1 of course, which you'll have to write and then get into the phone somehow. This will have to be done in an officially supported way if you plan to market this app; people aren't going to root their phones and void warranties just to send a fax. There's a lot more to it than just uttering "softmodem" and that's it. Softmodems all still had dedicated hardware to talk to, drivers, and users that were comfortable installing both. If you can write #1, then 3 and 4 follow. If you can't, you're fucked. The more I think about this, the less I believe that a driver that's close enough to the hardware can be written, at least not in an officially supported way. You could probably do it on one of the openmoko phones, but that project never really got off the ground. I don't think you can get deep enough with Android, and certainly not with the iphone. I don't agree that it follows that just because you can write a driver that the hardware has the capability to independently record incoming audio without the outgoing also being in the stream (#4). #3 might not be possible either; there's no reason to believe there is any path for software, at any level, to generate sounds on the line while in a call. I agree though, there are no DDKs for any of them that I'm aware of, making #1 a pipe dream for anyone but hardware hackers guessing at stuff and getting around driver signing issues. |
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I don't agree that it follows that just because you can write a driver that the hardware has the capability to independently record incoming audio without the outgoing also being in the stream (#4). #3 might not be possible either; there's no reason to believe there is any path for software, at any level, to generate sounds on the line while in a call. I agree though, there are no DDKs for any of them that I'm aware of, making #1 a pipe dream for anyone but hardware hackers guessing at stuff and getting around driver signing issues. I suppose I'm presuming that being able to write a driver that can do it assumes there is hardware that can –– otherwise, yes, you're not going to be able to do anything. I do know that phones have been able to do fax in the past, which leads me to believe that at least some chipsets have the capability, but I don't know what current capabilities are. The biggest issue is the separation between userspace and direct hardware access. I think if you have direct hardware access you can probably do it –– but getting that access may be a problem. |
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You could do it, but it would be slow as fuck even if you got it to work.
If you just HAD to have your own dedicated system, you could run a machine at home as a server, connect to it over the internet from the phone, and have the server connect to a phone line at the house. But why the hell would you want to do any of that? |
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You could do it, but it would be slow as fuck even if you got it to work. If you just HAD to have your own dedicated system, you could run a machine at home as a server, connect to it over the internet from the phone, and have the server connect to a phone line at the house. But why the hell would you want to do any of that? It's fax, of course it's going to be slow... The reason you want to do fax off of a phone is that some people still do business by fax, and being able to send documents from a phone directly to a fax machine would be a useful capability. Older GSM phones with CSD had the ability to do fax, I'm not sure how they did it though. |
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To implement a softmodem in a smartphone you're going to need... 1. A driver. This is the only way to reliably generate the clocks the modem is going to need. A user-space app on a multi-process OS isn't going to do it. 2. Ability to dial the phone. 3. Ability to send raw data, in the form of sounds, to the phone in realtime. 4. Ability to 'tap' the incoming sounds from the phone, in realtime, without also tapping the outgoing sound. 5. Ability to read (at least) files on the phone. 6. Muting the microphone (at least) without interfering with #3. I find it unlikely that most smartphones are capable of #3 and #4. The other parts might all be there, except #1 of course, which you'll have to write and then get into the phone somehow. This will have to be done in an officially supported way if you plan to market this app; people aren't going to root their phones and void warranties just to send a fax. There's a lot more to it than just uttering "softmodem" and that's it. Softmodems all still had dedicated hardware to talk to, drivers, and users that were comfortable installing both. 3 and 4 may very well be impossible. I have only a passing knowledge of some cell phone recording and monitoring software. On the android based phones that we experimented with, it was impossible to directly access the audio from user land code. ETA: Or, if possible, it will be hugely platform dependent. This is still ignoring that some codecs mangle fax signals beyond usefulness. |
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To implement a softmodem in a smartphone you're going to need... 1. A driver. This is the only way to reliably generate the clocks the modem is going to need. A user-space app on a multi-process OS isn't going to do it. 2. Ability to dial the phone. 3. Ability to send raw data, in the form of sounds, to the phone in realtime. 4. Ability to 'tap' the incoming sounds from the phone, in realtime, without also tapping the outgoing sound. 5. Ability to read (at least) files on the phone. 6. Muting the microphone (at least) without interfering with #3. I find it unlikely that most smartphones are capable of #3 and #4. The other parts might all be there, except #1 of course, which you'll have to write and then get into the phone somehow. This will have to be done in an officially supported way if you plan to market this app; people aren't going to root their phones and void warranties just to send a fax. There's a lot more to it than just uttering "softmodem" and that's it. Softmodems all still had dedicated hardware to talk to, drivers, and users that were comfortable installing both. 3 and 4 may very well be impossible. I have only a passing knowledge of some cell phone recording and monitoring software. On the android based phones that we experimented with, it was impossible to directly access the audio from user land code. ETA: Or, if possible, it will be hugely platform dependent. This is still ignoring that some codecs mangle fax signals beyond usefulness. The Android SDK does not allow it (I looked last night). I do not think that means it's necessarily impossible, but any solution created would have to be hardware dependent and would not be officially supportable. |
