[VoiceOps] Recommendations on Wholesale Fax Services

[Colton Conor]

What softswitch do you use to accomplish this?



On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 7:56 PM, Aviv Shaham <aviv at ironsip.com> wrote:

> 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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