T38Fax Blog

Cisco has released the next-generation replacement of the venerable SPA112 ATA, one of the company's most widely deployed ATAs which was declared EOL (End of Life) in the summer of 2020.

The ATA 191-MPP and ATA 192-MPP are part of Cisco’s line of best-in-class small business voice gateways and ATAs, designed to support office or residential communication needs.

The underlying technology has a strong pedigree in the SIP industry, having started out in the early days as Sipura Technology, which was wisely acquired by Cisco and branded as Linksys, then eventually promoted to the official Cisco brand.

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?

Podcast: CHANNEL PARTNERS – SPECIAL FEATURE – Finally, Fax technology that WORKS ALL THE TIME for Business, Fax Servers and Service Providers.

- Posted on Telecom Reseller on April 10, 2019

It is long overdue.  Sending faxes over the internet has been a problem since they first started sending them.  It is still an essential part of businesses but always the after-thought when migrating to the cloud. Faxes are not an after-thought any longer. Darren Nickerson, Founder and President of T38FAX, has been involved with faxes and the internet for decades. He explains to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication how he does it. It is a very interesting explanation of how he identified the actual internet-fax problem and how T38FAX fixed 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. 

Is T.38 Fax Over IP (FoIP) causing you headaches? Are you experiencing surprisingly poor fax performance after converting/upgrading to SIP phone service? Can't find the source of your troubles? We feel your pain, we really really do. The good news is that FoIP doesn’t have to be a nightmare and in fact, when done correctly it can be just as reliable as faxing over traditional phone lines.

As you may already know all too well, there are many places a T.38 implementation can go wrong. It could be an issue with the underlying carrier, the equipment, a firewall, the fax software itself, or even the settings used during configuration. With so many moving parts the failures you're experiencing can seem unpredictable, .... random even. That’s where T38Fax’s experienced support engineers can help. Our motto is science, not superstition, and we're in the myth busting business.

We are pleased to announce that we have successfully completed interoperability testing with FreeSWITCH, a powerful open source telephony platform capable of routing and connecting various communication protocols such as audio, video or text. FreeSWITCH was designed by several former developers of the popular Asterisk open source PBX and was created to address the drawbacks of proprietary solutions with a focus on key design goals such as stability and scalability.

Today, FreeSWITCH is used by thousands of businesses from all corners of the globe in a range of industries, including carriers, communication startups and enterprise businesses. At its core, 

We’re excited to announce that we've successfully completed interoperability testing with FusionPBX, a popular web front-end to FreeSWITCH, the legendary cross-platform scalable (and free) multi-protocol softswitch. 

In simple terms, FusionPBX is to FreeSwitch as FreePBX is to Asterisk - in other words it’s FreeSWITCH for mere mortals. FreeSWITCH is a powerful and scalable voice switch used by many of the world’s leading telecommunications service providers and a large percentage of businesses worldwide, but it has a pretty steep learning curve and can take weeks, if not months to master. 

FusionPBX adds extra functionality to the FreeSwitch platform while making it easy to administer via an attractive

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.

T38Fax knows that providing and supporting reliable Fax over IP (FoIP) can be a key differentiator for VoIP service providers. VoIP networks are optimized for voice services, not fax, making it challenging for these service providers to support FoIP. That’s why we partnered with Telinta, a global leader in cloud-based white label switching and billing solutions for VoIP service providers and their resellers. Their portfolio includes business and residential VoIP, hosted PBX, audio-conferencing, calling card, pinless, mobile, callback and wholesale VoIP. By working together, we can deliver reliable fax solutions to VoIP service providers.

Do you manufacture or represent a product such as a VoIP gateway, ATA, fax server or other such device that supports T.38 Fax Over IP (FoIP)? Do you frequently hear from customers having trouble getting T.38 to work reliably in their environment? If so, do you wish you could recommend a SIP trunk provider who specializes in T.38 and offers carrier-grade T.38 termination and origination to pair with your equipment? Well I have great news for you, ... we do that.

Believe it or not, we sell SIP trunks whose only purpose in life is to offer reliable fax transmission! We use our own T.38 technology, backed by a team of fax industry veterans to deliver a truly carrier-grade level of service that rivals the PSTN. We also have a team of engineers that work hard testing T.38-enabled equipment to make sure it works seamlessly with our Power-T.38 service.

Once a device is interop certified, we post a knowledge base 

article on our support site and publicize it on our