[VoiceOps] Recommendations on Wholesale Fax Services

[Aviv Shaham]

We have a unique solution - we take regular ATAs such as HT802 or Obi302
and make them behave more like how store-and-forward units do.
Both outgoing and incoming faxes are first intercepted in full by the
softswitch and only then forwarded to their destination. This also lets
us store copies of the faxes for access via the online portal or send
incoming faxes strictly as e-fax for those customers that have such
features enabled.
Sent faxes go from ATA to softswitch over T.38 (in some cases we enforce
G711 only). Once received successfully (and we have extremely high
success rate on this leg of the call since no PSTN or some other DID
carrier is involved), we proceed to transmit from the softswitch to
destination fax number over T.38 or G711 via reliable carriers with
several retries on failures as well as adjustments of various settings.
In some cases we use third party APIs if we can't deliver the fax
successfully ourselves. This combination of send methods guarantees that
if there's a fax machine on the other end (and it's turned on..), the
fax *will* be sent one way or another. Our system also "remembers" which
method worked best for each destination number and will try it first
next time around.
Once sent (or failed to the point where we are not going to retry
anymore - ie. busy for an hour, no fax machine detected at all, no
answer, etc.), we send out a confirmation back to the fax machine or via
email/SMS.
On the receiving end, as I said, we intercept the fax on the softswitch
and upon completion deliver to ATA over T.38 and/or via email as
attachment or SMS as download link. Customers like this because they
can receive unlimited concurrent fax transmissions without ever
appearing busy to the sending side. We simply queue the forwarding to
their ATA as needed.
Aviv


On Sun, Feb 11, 2018, at 2:43 PM, Colton Conor wrote:
> Like many I wish fax would just die, but it remains to be alive and
> kicking. Today our wholesale provider has a fax to email option, and a
> HTTPS fax adapter option. These are completely separate products
> today, and you can't use the same fax number on both of them. However,
> our customers really want both options combined into one, using the
> customer's same fax number. They would like:> 
> Inbound faxes go to email using fax to email. If desired, they can
> also make a copy go the their HTTPs fax adapter so the fax machine
> prints it out. The same fax number will be used by multiple employees,
> so hopefully there is no a limit on how many email addresses can be
> used for sending and receiving faxes.> 
> Outbound faxes are sent using the fax HTTPs adapter connected to their
> fax machine. The outbound number that the fax sever uses should be the
> actual clients fax number. Currently the wholesale fax solution we use
> displays some random number when sending outbound faxes from a
> completely different area code.> 
> Additionally, the client would like a web interface where they can
> send outbound faxes, and download inbound faxes.The web interface
> should show if the HTTPS fax adapter is registered to the service.> 
> Anyone have recommendations? I don't like the idea of using a regular
> T.38 or G.711 adapter as I don't think those work well.> 
> It seems the going retail rate for a fax service is $19.95 per month,
> so hopefully this wholesale solution would be in the $5 to $10 range
> per month. I assume there would be a one time fee for the actual
> adapter.> 
> Please let me know if you know anything that meets this criteria. 
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