[cisco-voip] Fax Servers

[Davis, Michael]

I've been directly involved, from a service provider's standpoint,  with a large customer's Xmedius integration for the last several months.  Here are a few issues with Xmedius.  YMMV.
 
First, like most FaxoIP vendors, they only support T.38/14.4kbps.  This works great for G3 compression / throughput, since G3 is all that T.38 supports. This will cover you ~90% of the time.  However, for that other 10% of fax calls, many fax machines built when SG3 standard was new, either fail to negotiate down or require operator intervention to do so.  IOS, as of 12.3T/12.4mainline, as well as older AS5xxx gateways with DFCs try T.38, and fallback to passthrough mode on the assumption that the 33.6kbps call is a modem call.  You may find that you will need ingress gateways that force SG3 to negotiate G3 speeds. This enhanced functionality is available in platforms supporting PVDM2s and 12.4T code (I don't remember the specific rev., but CCO can hook you up.)
 
Second, Passthrough and cisco-relay are not options for Xmedius. So if you are using VG248 or ATA devices as fax ingress points, they will not inter-operate with Xmedius.
 
Third,  Xmedius H323 stack works well if you are doing peer-to-peer, ie single dial-peer for faxes on ingress and Xmedius points to a single egress gateway.  However, if you are leveraging gatekeepers,  you'll find that 1) you cannot specify a zone for registration. Xmedius will register as a terminal with the first zone configured in the gatekeeper CLI.  You can restrict this behavior with zone subnet statements, but that is a pain to maintain in a dynamic or service provider environment. 2) Inbound calls from ingress to Xmedius will not RAS properly.  Static aliases will be required.
 
HTH,
 
Michael
 
 

________________________________

From: cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net on behalf of Ortiz, Carlos
Sent: Thu 5/25/2006 1:15 PM
To: ciscovoip
Cc: Voll, Scott
Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] Fax Servers



When I was looking at them the two choices I was looking at were RightFax (Cisco OEM's this) and Xmedius.  I liked Xmedius because it is a software only solution using your existing IP gateways (h.323).   I tested it and it worked well, but we still have not implemented anything because the project we needed it for fell through.

 

Carlos

 

________________________________

From: cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Voll, Scott
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 1:58 PM
To: ciscovoip
Subject: [cisco-voip] Fax Servers

 

What kind of price range am I look at for a Fax server that ties in with CM?  what are the best out there.  I have big xerox's that can do scanning so I would like to tie it all together.

 

Can I use Unity as a fax server?  How does that work?

 

Scott