I consulted with a large telecommunications company recently who has been providing fax to email conversion service to their 600,000 fax customers for many years. When the company decided to migrate their telo infrastructure from TDM to VoIP, they gained some significant cost savings in overhead but the quality of fax services they were now providing to their users have suffered greatly and customers are not happy.
They told me that when some customers receive faxes into their email from their on premise fax solution, the fax document is sometimes blank, unreadable or missing pages. The worst part of this business challenge is the sending fax party would receive a successful transmission report, even if the fax that was received at the other end was blank. I explained to them, "Unreliable fax communication is a real big deal for many companies, especially if the fax represents business revenue or is tied to a business process". They asked me, "Why is this happening and how do we fix our fax problem"?
I grinned and said, "You need some FoIP for your VoIP". Still confused, they asked me how I could help. I explained that this sort of thing happens all the time with companies of all sizes who are switching from TDM to VoIP. Everyone wants the agility of a VoIP network and the cost savings of SIP trunking delivered over MPLS or Metro Ethernet. But what companies quickly realize is that they have grossly overlooked the technical requirements for fax in a VoIP network.
When you take a G.711 or G.729 fax transmission, encapsulate it into an IP stream and send it thru a couple of different network end points or session boarder controllers, you have to make sure that signal processing and media transcoding can support T.38. Without running T.38 for fax, you are subject to poor fax quality, and unhappy users.
Our solution was to provide this telecommunications carrier with the Ingenium VMware Fax Appliance, powered by Open Text Fax Server (RightFax). Our fax solution uses a boardless T.38 fax codec that supports Error Correction Mode (ECM) for faxing and can be deployed in SIP, H.323 and MGCP environments. We added a Dialogic Multimedia Border Controller (MMBE) between the SIP carrier and our fax solution to provide enhanced security and reliability.
They took advantage of our simple license model which provides licensing from 2 to 60 channels and can run up to 120 ports on a single VMware machine. Other options included native connectors for Microsoft Exchange (2003, 2007 and 2010), Microsoft SharePoint, Barcode Routing, Do Not Fax Rules, Spam Fax Filter, SMS, Fax Reporting and Fax Archiving. We also helped them become compliant with fax so they could meet the compliance standards for PCI DSS and the Sarbanes Oxley Act.
For more information about how Ingenium Software can help solve your company's fax challenges, please contact us.
SIP Trunking: Part 2
15 years ago