Just out of college I moved to San Francisco where the dot com bubble had just burst. Marketing roles were tight, so I picked up a job at a law firm delivering faxes and mail to make ends meet. Most peoples’ experience with faxing is that it is reliable and easy. My experience was much different because in scale, one gets the true picture. Send or receive 15 pages a day, easy. Send and receive hundreds a day, and the reliability factor goes fast!
Now, the tricky issue of Faxing over IP haunts most businesses. Is there an answer or is faxing just the collateral damage of a new technology?
On one hand, inbound faxes do not tend to cause problems. FoIP allows fax to email, which pretty much removes the hourly walk to the fax machine and wasted time hoping the next one will not be an advertisement from a local adventure retreats company, sent to “Boss”. Not to forget, it eradicates my old internal distribution position. It is a great option and well worth finding an IP PBX or a carrier that has it available.
On the other hand, fax machines sometimes have problems being hooked directly to a SIP Trunk or VoIP line.
Faxing outbound, can be very a different story than fax to email. Fax machines essentially use a series of pitches and sounds to transmit data via a telephone connection (MODEM). You have probably heard the screech at some point when someone fat fingered your fax number into your main line. FoIP makes those sounds into a digital stream, and if you are familiar with the record to CD debates of the 80′s you’ll be surprised to know that there is significant quality loss, at least in FoIP. And machines are much more exacting than humans.
The fax machine makes analog noises, the ATA breaks them into digital parts, they go out and then get reassembled by another device at the other end and finally back to analog noises to the other fax. This outlines the bulk of the problems that two fax machines can have. They are both talking but the barely perceptible amount of jitter to us, is like having philharmonic orchestra replaced by 50 banjos to the machines. Mostly, it causes increased dropped or failed faxes, not a loss in quality when the fax is successful.
That being said, there are two common solutions for transmitting sound, the G.711 codec and the T.38 codec. Many are standing by T.38 as a better solution, but some point out a G.711 codec machine and a T.38 often fail to interact. Many techies even argue that because of the wide range of machine standards, no solution works every time.
Some companies have tried to side-step these issues by creating a somewhat strange work around for clients. Essentially, clients scan and email documents to the service company, and the service company gets it and puts it on a traditional line. Effective, but less than elegant.
My preferred solution is to look at a companies usage and see if they can switch to scanning and emailing directly to the recipient. If not, keep a POTS line for outbound faxes. The company still saves money with VOIP, but there is never a fax issue.
In the longer run, I have to wonder if fax will continue to play an essential role in business. With standards for protecting and digitally signing documents really solidifying in the US, why fax at all? It pulls the person from their chair, interrupting a productive day, and leaves them thinking of the movie Office Space. Really, who hasn’t wanted to beat down a fax machine?
