Fax DOES Integrate into Modern IP Infrastructures
June 16th, 2010 by alison
… And you do not need to convert IP voice calls into old style analogue calls to do this!
Paul Bamberger, Technical Consultant at Avanquest ProcessFlows recounts a recent conversation he had on the train with a senior telecoms consultant who worked for a major UK telecommunications company.
For many reasons, which I won’t bother you with, I travel a lot by train and one of the things I have a bad habit of doing is chatting to whoever is unlucky enough to be sitting next to or opposite me. Firstly, if you are someone who I have spoken too, please accept my apologies if all you actually wanted to do was read your novel, catch up with the newspaper or enjoy your latest iTunes download.
I genuinely find snapshots of peoples’ lives from these brief conversations can be quite fascinating. For me, some of the most interesting conversations are around the work that people do and especially their experience of technologies and the associated struggles that they have in their work. When I tell them that I am involved in Document Management and Fax Server technologies, many have stories of how inefficient their businesses are – it’s almost tempting to hand over a business card – but there is a silent etiquette for these conversations that usually precludes it.
Sometimes I am able to suggest ideas to them that they would have dismissed. On a recent journey out of London on a packed commuter train, stood in the vestibule, I chatted to a senior telecoms consultant who worked for a major UK telecommunications company. When he discovered that I worked with fax he was quite dismissive of the technology, not because he felt it was irrelevant – he recognised that there are large business sectors where it is still a key means of communication – but because fax is unable to integrate into modern IP telephone technologies.
The problem, he explained, was that fax machines and fax servers needed IP voice calls to be converted back into an old style analogue calls – he informed me that when he discussed this with the technology experts in the business and they had confirmed it. I know they are not on their own on this – it seems to be widely accepted by the telecoms industry that fax does not integrate into modern IP infrastructures.
What I was able to explain to him was that his knowledge was out of date! He seemed genuinely surprised to discover that we can connect our Fax Servers via IP (Fax over IP) to either the IP telephone systems (including makes such as Cisco, Avaya and Nortel) or directly to IP trunks provided by the telecommunications company. Many businesses who move to VoIP systems have to put in analogue fax lines or converters to support fax machines and multi-function printers – I explained how we could remove this need.
Then he got off the train.
Left with me in the vestibule area were a mother and daughter, who had spent the last half hour dissecting a burger & fries and a man in uncomfortable looking bicycle shorts, holding his bike up at an odd angle so people could walk by. They didn’t seem that interested in Fax over IP … but maybe a conversation on healthy eating?
If you’d like to talk about how we can help integrate your fax into your VoIP environment, just email with your regular train routes, times and where you sit.
