Posts tagged “tech-tips”

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.

If you're reading this blog, then you rely on FoIP in some way, and it's likely causing you headaches. Maybe you're a single ATA user trying to fax with your current carrier, but not having much luck. Perhaps you have a fax server that won't work consistently now that you've upgraded your phone network to VoIP. Or you're a service provider that can't seem to provide reliable FoIP to your customers and fax support is causing you nightmares.

If you fit into any of these categories, then your business depends on FoIP, but you can't get it to work reliably. As you upgrade your communications infrastructure to SIP, fax support can get left behind. Finding a carrier that guarantees (and supports!!) T.38 on your service is almost impossible. If you’re a carrier or service provider, you know that successful T.38 requires significant investment in equipment and expertise and fax troubleshooting takes skill from seasoned fax experts.

Luckily, we can help! T38Fax provides reliable faxing and premium support over our SIP trunks, which were specifically designed for T.38. Whether you’re a single fax user, a business with a fax server or IP-PBX, or a hosted VoIP or SIP trunk vendor, our Power-T.38 service can work for you. Find your use-case scenario below and see how.

Obihai Technology is a leading manufacturer in the Voice over IP industry and maker of the best-selling OBi universal voice adapters and IP phones. Their analog telephone adapters (ATAs) and gateways can bridge mobile, fixed line, and Internet telephone services. They also support T.38, an essential feature to ensure reliable faxing over SIP trunks.

The OBi202, OBi302, OBi504vs, and OBi508vs are each equipped with multiple ports and are capable of connecting to more than one DID. If you are using one of these devices, you can take advantage of multi-DID routing, which can save you money and decrease the complexity of your configuration. You can consolidate a group of DIDs under a single SIP registration. This will give you the flexibility