One of the most respected names and leading authorities on FoIP is Cisco’s David Hanes. These links provide neutral information on FoIP:

• Implementing Fax over IP
• The Emergence of T.38 as the De Fact Standard for FoIP
• Facebook Forum Summary – Fax Over IP (FoIP) Basics, Design and Best Practices 

Question #9: Who is the Market Leader in FoIP?

We don’t mean to toot our own horn, but OpenText is the world leader of FoIP as well as traditional fax servers (source: Davidson Consulting).   Frost and Sullivan, in their November 2010 Enterprise Fax Market Report, announced that OpenText is the fax server market share leader by almost double its nearest competitor.

OpenText RightFax has been successfully deployed across multiple IP networks and SIP trunks. RightFax 10 (released in June of 2011), has many feature enhancements which will assist you with your FoIP deployments. RightFax is also much more than fax. Embedded as part of RightFax is a secure document delivery solution called SecureDocs that allows you to send and track almost any file type securely.

Question #9 and 1/2: Where can I go to discuss FoIP with the experts?

Don’t miss your chance to hear from two of the industry’s leading experts on FoIP: David Hanes; Gonzalo Salgueiro from Cisco – two guys who literally wrote the book on FoIP. Join David and Gonzalo on November 10^th for an educational webinar that will Explore the Roadmap of SIP Trunking for FoIP. You can also view a recording of a recent joint webinar by OpenText and Dialogic Take the Mystery out of SIP Trunking.

Matthew Brine, General Manager
Fax and Document Distribution Group
OpenText Corporation

Joshua Butcher, Senior Technical Instructor
Fax and Document Distribution Group
OpenText Corporation

Many fax service providers use SMTP (T.37 store-and-forward) as the transport layer for sending and receiving faxes from the fax service to the fax service user.T.37 faxing, even though it is over the Internet, is not the best choice for fax traffic that demand real-time response. According to the technology analyst group Gartner, a fax service may not be suitable if fax traffic is mission critical, time sensitive or contains confidential material due to issues associated with SMTP and service provider security.

Question #5: Can FoIP actually reduce costs?

Choosing a FoIP implementation versus a traditional TDM fax server implementation can reduce costs (including lower energy usage), improve IT efficiency and reduce downtime by consolidating PSTN resources as well as being able to be implemented in virtualized environments. Learn more about the many benefits of FoIP by reading this FoIP whitepaper or visiting http://faxsolutions.opentext.com/fax-over-ip.aspx.

 Part 4 to come on Monday, November 7th.

Earlier this year, Matthew Brine wrote an article for Telecom Reseller  that spoke to how fax continues to be an integral part of business today.  The essence of the article was to debunk the myth that fax is obsolescent technology and explain how fax has evolved to assist many companies to reduce their costs, streamline (automate) business processes and improve employee productivity.

A key component driving the evolution of fax technology is fax over IP (FoIP) or IP faxing as it is sometimes called.  Although the concept of FoIP is not new, it can be difficult to find a simple and consistent explanation of FoIP, thus causing confusion and questions.   Some of this confusion is caused by suppliers of FoIP technology in an effort to promote their own products. Consequently, I thought it would be good to provide some information about FoIP and share some resources to help you make the best decision for your company and your fax needs.

Here are 9 ½ questions and answers that will help you gain insight into FoIP:

Question #1: What exactly is FoIP?

FoIP is simply a means of sending and receiving faxes over an IP network. There are basically three different kinds of FoIP protocols that can be used: G.711 pass-through, T.37 store-and-forward and T.38 fax relay.

• G.711 pass-through works just like a voice over IP (VoIP) call where every component of the fax communication is sent in the form of voice packets. If you lose some of those voice packets, the fax can easily be distorted resulting in failed transmissions. Since the traffic is all voice packets, bandwidth demands can be pretty high.

• T.37 store-and-forward works more like an e-mail where the fax content is sent to a mail server to be processed. Unlike the other FoIP protocols this is not real-time, meaning that there is no way for the sender to know whether the fax is actually being received at the same time you are sending it.

• T.38 fax relay only sends just enough voice packets (i.e., tones) for a media gateway to determine whether the call is a fax or not. The rest of the fax tones are then “relayed” from the gateway and not the fax server itself.

Stay tuned for the next post on Monday, October 31st.

As a fax-nerd, I am pretty excited about our September 22nd webinar: Take the Mystery out of SIP Trunking. From a fax perspective and at its most basic definition, SIP trunking simply means to send a fax from one IP device to another without having to go through the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

This is where the Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP) comes to the rescue. Ultimately, there are two important “take-aways” from this upcoming session that I think are worth noting:

First, make sure you are using a Session Border Controller.

You have two methods of working with SIP Trunking: a) piggy-back on your existing internet connection and risking the performance and security issues that come with that or b) get a Session Border Controller (SBC) which will be used to manage the connection between your site and the ITSP. The choice of using a SBC should seem obvious if you are in the enterprise fax world.

Second, know your FoIP protocol choices.

In the world of Fax over IP (FoIP), there are really only two options to consider: T.38 Fax Relay (where the IP gateway agrees to “relay” the fax tones sent to/from the fax server) or Fax Pass-through (where the IP Gateway simply “passes” the fax tone samples sent to/from the fax server).  This makes T.38 Fax Relay the better choice as you do not have to encapsulate every little fax squeak and noise and then over the network between the OpenText RightFax server and the ITSP.  It is the fax tone samples that are the most sensitive to network problems and if lost or out of sync, you are most likely going to get some fax transmission errors. This means if you are using Fax Pass-through instead of T.38 Fax Relay, you may have some issues with SIP Trunking (in particular if you do not use a SBC).

If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to register for Take the Mystery Out of SIP Trunking on September 22 at 10AM PDT. 

If you have any experiences with SIP trunk faxing, I would love to hear them. You can tweet me @JoshuaTeaches or via email at jbutcher@opentext.com

Image provided by amanderson2

I have been in the technical support business for almost 12 years now troubleshooting anything from operating systems, to routers, to – well, faxing. During that time, I have worked with a lot of people with various skill sets and I have determined there are basically two types of support professionals: Support Technicians and Support Engineers.

Support Technicians: Typically have a good grasp of the fundamentals, techniques and usage of a project. They are great at finding resources and providing documented solutions to issues that end users, and even administrators, may not have been able to find on their own.

Support Engineers: They are the ones who find solutions to issues that are possibly not documented at all. They must be able to take a product and reverse engineer it to determine what is really happening beneath the hood. Because of this process of dissection and analysis, they are able to develop instincts of how the product works and therefore are able to come up with creative solutions that a technician may never even consider.

Fax Flow Troubleshooting

How well do you know the Open Text Fax Server (RightFax)? The real question is – How well do you want to know it? If you want to look under the hood and see how the parts work together, but do not have the time to become a programmer – we have the perfect course for you: Fax Flow Troubleshooting.

In the Fax Flow Troubleshooting course, we break down the processing of a faxes into stages so we can follow the faxes all the way through the fax server. We then systematically stop and start services to follow the faxes to see how they are processed and why they were processed the way that they were.

Here is a sample from the Fax Flow Troubleshooting course:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A23AMdaJ-aw&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6]
If you want to learn more about the Open Text Fax Server (RightFax) through the process of reverse engineering, but just do not have the time dig in on your own, this course is for you!

Note: The course does have a prerequisite! It is for people who are already at have at least a technician level knowledge of the fax server but want to get a better feel for how it works. For this reason, you must be certified in the Fax Server Fundamentals before you will be permitted to attend this course.

Here are the course schedules: http://www.opentext.com/2/global/services-home/ls-learning-services-home/ls-offering-captaris.htm

Mastery of the fundamental ideas of a field involves not only the grasping of general principles, but also the development of an attitude toward learning and inquiry, toward guessing and hunches, toward the possibility of solving problems on one’s own. ~ Jerome Bruner