[VoiceOps] Recommendations on Wholesale Fax Services

[Brian Hales]

Check out Documo(formerly known as mFax). We recently just moved over to them and have been very pleased with the service and support. They offer Fax to Email, ATA and web portal access.


Brian

From: VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> on behalf of Aviv Shaham <aviv at ironsip.com>
Date: Sunday, February 11, 2018 at 8:57 PM
To: "voiceops at voiceops.org" <voiceops at voiceops.org>
Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Recommendations on Wholesale Fax Services

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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