T38Fax Blog

I used to feel defensive when people asked me what I did for a living. I suppose it should have come as no surprise that people would do a double take when I answered. After all, I've built a business around a technology that is now considered obsolete by most, and was thought to be in decline even in 2002 when I began.

 

Hello, my name is Darren, and I am a Fax Entrepreneur.

No, you didn't hear me wrong, I'm a card-carrying member of the facsimile fan club. I have been since 1992 when, while a PhD student at the University of Oxford, I assumed the persona of 'Arlington Hewes' of The Phone Company (TPC.INT) and began to learn about HylaFAX (then FlexFax) ... industrial software for sending massive amounts of faxes. I'm sure many of you can look back on pivotal times in your lives ... a time when many doors are open and choices have to be made, decisions that lead to everything that follows. This was one such time.

So why would anyone in their right mind base a business on fax, you might ask? And if they had made such a mistake, how could they possibly still be doing it?

 

Our Power-T.38 product is similar to the SIP trunks you might purchase from another VoIP Service provider, with one significant difference - our SIP trunks are not only guaranteed to offer astoundingly reliable T.38 Fax Over IP call termination and origination, but that's really all they're meant to do. These purpose-built trunks are also competitively priced, making them suitable to everyone from the largest telecommunications carriers to the single home office fax machine connected with an analog telephone adapter (ATA).

We understand that you have many choices in today's crowded telecommunications market, so here are a few reasons you should give Power-T.38 a try:

1. We do T.38 correctly. Almost nobody else does. We know, we looked!
2. We support facsimile ECM (Error Correction Mode). You need it, and we insist on it.
3. The largest SIP carriers don't understand T.38 at all - they're voice people.
4. T.38 Fax Over IP is an elegant, extremely effective solution to a very real problem.
5. It's free to try us, we even give you $25 and unlimited support from true fax experts.

We'll discuss each of those points in more detail, below. 

 

I'm going to let you in on a secret: it’s impossible to fax reliably over most VoIP services (SIP trunks) being sold these days, no matter how well you understand and implement T.38 Fax Over IP (FoIP), because the product you’re buying is fundamentally broken.

 

As crazy as it sounds, it’s missing the one feature that makes sure the other side receives an exact copy of your image: Error Correction Mode (ECM).

 

Each day, millions of fax pages are sent via T.38 circuits that don’t have ECM enabled, and everyone just kind of hopes the fax pages make it to the other side intact. Sounds crazy? We agree!!

 

What is ECM and why is it important?

Fax is a page-by-page transmission method, usually done over standard telephone lines. The image data from each page is converted into an audio representation of the page, the audio is sent to the other side, and when both parties are ready, they move on to the next page.

 

Now, the clever people who invented the fax protocol realized that phone lines are imperfect and that every once in a while there will be a pop, crackle, hum or hiss that distorts that audio signal, leading to loss of fax page image data.

 

That's where ECM comes in – at the end of each page, the sender and the receiver compare notes, check for any missing or distorted page image data, and then selectively re-transmit only that data. Again they compare notes, and if there's still missing data they repeat the process, only moving to the next page when the current page is 100% correct.

When ECM is not available, however, the end-of-page procedure is quite different, and error checking and error correction ability is limited.

 

We are pleased to announce that our Power-T.38 fax-optimized SIP trunks have been certified compatible with Dialogic's Brooktrout SR140 fax software. SR140 is a host-based Fax over IP (FoIP) engine that brings the power of the industry-leading Dialogic Brooktrout fax hardware products (such as the TR114 & TR1034 fax boards) to software-based solutions. Dialogic SR140 is one of the most mature, most widely deployed T.38 implementations in the world.

 

T38Fax.com has passed Dialogic's rigorous FoIP Interoperability testing process, and now appears on their  list of recommended SIP Trunks. They have also published a configuration guide that explains the exact configuration they used for testing, which can be downloaded below.

Planning a visit to ITEXPO in beautiful Miami Beach this month? Drop-in to Booth #534 to meet members of the T38Fax.com Sales & Engineering team and learn more about how our T.38 Fax Over IP service can eliminate all of those nagging fax performance problems you've been troubleshooting. Don't forget to ask about our special promotional offer!!

Why not be our guest, VIP style!? We, in cooperation with our sister company and fellow booth attendee Telephony Depot, are pleased to offer you complimentary VIP access to the show. Quantities are limited, so claim yours now! 

Grandstream's IP voice & video products offer the best price-to-performance point in the industry. We are pleased to announce that we have completed interoperability testing with Grandstream's engineering team, and will support Grandstream's entire product line under our highest (Certified) interoperation category. Supported devices include the HandyTone ATA (analog telephone adapter) models HT502, HT503, HT701, HT702 and HT704, enterprise analog IP gateway models GXW4004, GXW4008 and GXW4024, and the Grandstream UCM6100 series IP PBX Appliance.