by Scott Riley, 2021.
The high error rates and slow speeds you face with critical fax traffic travelling and transcoding over VoIP segments can be avoided with very little effort. New technologies to displace legacy fax are now mainstream.
It is common for business-related fax traffic to interfere with the deployment and contract-signing of VoIP infrastructure and services, while causing unexpected delays with your data center moves. Fortunately, newer technology solutions that fulfill fax requirements can streamline the successful adoption of VoIP. These solutions provide an easy means for customers to implement more reliable and more secure fax communications, as well as delivering high-speed, encrypted “document transfer services” that are downward compatible to fax.
A major benefit shared by both customers and telecom vendors when leveraging mainstream fax technologies is the ability to remove telecom-oriented obstacles created by the strict data-modem requirements of fax, and of fax codecs. This paves the way for IP-PBX infrastructure moves, dedicated voice-grade SIP trunks, or other major telecom services to be deployed without fax issues being a factor. You simply isolate the fax traffic away from these voice-optimized telecom solutions, thereby preventing fax from interfering with your cloud migrations or IP Telecom (IPT) mandates.
The most important takeaway for IT executives to understand is this: Reputable IPT carriers and IP-PBX solution vendors that are largely purpose-built for voice traffic may enthusiastically claim robust support for fax, but in reality they are frequently
- not fully engineered for fax codecs,
- not optimized for routing to all fax endpoints,
- substantially slower with fax speeds
- not upward-compatible to faster document transfer services, and
- much harder to troubleshoot.
Ultimately, this adds expensive support burdens to your business; reduces successful fax deliveries; causes missed, delayed, and duplicate orders; and results in reduced compliance.
This insightful technical brief (PDF) explains the challenges of fax over VoIP environments. Armed with this knowledge, you can make the case for fax-optimized environments using fax over document transfer services or fax-friendly Fax over IP carrier services.
Some of the problems faced by both IP Telecom vendors and customers include:
- High failure rates that cannot be explained or resolved — regardless of any technical support from the carrier — leading to high levels of frustration and costs to the business.
- Delayed SIP service contracts from major carriers like AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, etc.
- Interference with strategies to migrate to a cloud infrastructure, Azure, or AWS.
- Suboptimal (or worse) fax support from PBX infrastructures such as Avaya, Mitel, Shortel, Asterisk, and Cisco, as well as from VoIP services in the cloud.
The solutions to these problems are straightforward with the proper partner. These enable you to:
- Connect your existing or new fax server, virtualized if desired, directly to cloud Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) using fax over highly secure document transfer services.
- Connect your existing or new fax server, virtualized if desired, directly to secure cloud-based SIP trunks that are engineered for fax.
- Use a pure cloud service for fax with minimum on-premise requirements (some feature fidelity may be lost with pure cloud fax services).
You can reach an engineer at Novaris Communications for a technical scope call should you need further guidance and vendor support.