March 1999

IP Fax Moves Into The Mainstream

BY THADDEUS BOUCHARD

Reliance on immediate turnaround in business correspondence has driven explosive growth in the number of faxes companies must handle daily. Traditional faxing methods, using a standalone fax machine and the PSTN (public switched telephone network), can account for a hefty 40 percent of a company's long-distance charges. These charges, plus the costs of maintenance, supplies, and lost employee time, make traditional faxing an expensive proposal. But, since 85 percent of faxed documents originate on a computer, it follows that offering fax capabilities as part of the existing computer infrastructure can reduce company overhead. The good news is that, as communications technology evolves, fax is rapidly changing to offer a faster, cheaper, more efficient method of transferring data.

FAX SERVER TECHNOLOGY: THE FIRST ALTERNATIVE
Fax server software is a current alternative to traditional faxing. A fax server allows corporate users connected to a network to send and receive faxes from their desktop. Outbound faxes are sent from the desktop to the fax server and then from the fax server over a modem/telephone line connection to the intended fax recipient.

With a fax server in place, corporations minimize telephone charges for sending faxes, increase the capacity and reliability of the fax infrastructure, and reduce costs associated with fax machines, additional phone lines, wasted paper, and decreased employee productivity. A fax sent on a manual machine takes an average of six to seven minutes to send. Based on this figure, replacing standalone machines with fax server software can save a company 1,383 hours, or 172 eight-hour work days, per fax machine per year.

Fax server software routes documents efficiently without ever generating paper. Users have the ability to fax directly from the desktop via e-mail clients, fax client software, and other application software such a spreadsheets, browsers, and Word documents. Retrieved faxes can be routed directly to a printer; an appropriate mailbox, via an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) interface, Direct Inward Dialing (DID), or Dual-Tone Multifrequency (DTMF); or an e-mail gateway. E-mail gateways allow users to include integrated messaging functions that accommodate voice, e-mail, and fax, providing users with a unified inbox.

A NEW FAX ALTERNATIVE
While fax technology has advanced beyond the simple telephony-based, manual fax machine, users now have a faster and cheaper means of data transfer: IP faxing. Internet Protocol (IP) faxing, a relatively new technology that employs a similar concept to fax server software, is slowly becoming less of a curiosity and more of an option on most high-end machines. Major fax machine manufacturers are beginning to offer fax machines that have Ethernet connections and can route faxes sent to certain destinations over the IP network. Employing the IP network can result in dramatic cost savings, taking traffic off the per-minute priced PSTN and putting it on the more efficient, much lower cost IP data network. It is estimated that IP faxing can cut your fax bill by 50 percent or more.

HOW IP FAXING WORKS
IP fax involves transmitting a fax over the Internet or private corporate intranets for at least part of its journey. This differs from traditional fax, wherein faxes are sent entirely over ordinary telephone/fax lines. The opportunity to shift fax transmission onto an IP-based infrastructure is here. The benefits of doing so include dramatic reduction of a company's telecommunications bill and the ability to manage fax documents and their transmission through a digital platform.

The transmission of fax documents over IP is a much easier problem to tackle than IP-based voice. Fax is inherently an asynchronous, bandwidth-light, delay-tolerant type of communication, whereas voice is inherently synchronous, bandwidth-hungry, and delay-intolerant.

IP FAX VARIATIONS
There are several general variations of IP fax. Which solution a company chooses largely depends on the fax structure of the organization. IP fax takes on different characteristics depending, for example, on whether it involves IP fax-enabled fax machines, Internet fax services integrated with user e-mail or Web browser software, or IP fax integrated with IP voice services. Benefits vary too, from reducing or eliminating per-call transmission charges, to enabling paper documents to arrive in Internet-based mailboxes, to allowing for the retrieval of faxes from anywhere in the world, as long as there is Internet access.

Because IP fax is a relatively new technology, companies should evaluate their existing network infrastructure before deciding which variation to implement.

IP Fax Machines And Fax Servers
One of the first variations to be introduced to the market was the IP fax machine. The major fax machine manufacturers are beginning to offer fax machines that have Ethernet connections and can route certain faxes (depending on destination) over the IP network. Most fax server vendors are moving in the direction of supporting fax delivery to IP-enabled fax machines. Smart fax server vendors are also working to help manage enterprise large-scale deployments of IP fax devices by providing central management of the phone books used at the fax machine for specifying IP-fax recipients, as well as central collection and management of the documents sent by these fax machines.

There are also Internet fax services and IP-related features supported by LAN fax servers. Such features allow users to submit faxes from the fax machine to the network fax server, then the fax server delivers the fax to its intended recipient. This eliminates the need for a fax machine to have access to an external phone line or PBX port, or users can opt to keep an external phone line available as a backup. Then, if the network or the fax server is not available, they can send the fax automatically over the traditional PBX/PSTN. With this variation, inbound faxes can be routed through the fax server to the individual fax machines and multifunction devices. The fax server allows central archiving of all inbound faxes.

Store-And-Forward
Another variation that works similarly to e-mail is store-and-forward Internet fax, which does not deliver faxes in real time, but rather compresses a file and transports it. For immediate message delivery, there's also real-time Internet fax, which mimics the operation of traditional fax calls over telephone lines, but does so over IP networks instead.

Other Options
There are also IP fax systems that send documents (originally paper) to e-mail inboxes. Here, the server-side phone book maps individual send-to phone numbers to individual or multiple e-mail addresses or fax numbers. Such systems also offers features like speed dialing and the ability to send fax broadcasts.

Other methods similar to IP fax systems are those that route faxes over IP networks based on least-cost routing tables, and systems that route faxes end-to-end over IP networks from one Internet fax device to another. Users can set up a satellite server in each of their offices worldwide, and then route outbound faxes over their data network to these satellite servers and then from the satellite server to local dial numbers over the PSTN. This method is very cost-effective: the servers are easy to install and set up, and there is no software configuration necessary at the remote site.

POTENTIAL DRAWBACKS
The drawbacks of IP fax vary with the type of solution implemented. The most significant drawback is the delay, which could be anywhere from one minute to one day (this is in contrast with traditional PSTN faxing, where when the call ends, the fax has been delivered). Delays also occur with confirmations or error reports - these can be returned with some delay, or they may not be returned at all. Other drawbacks include awkwardness when entering IP addresses of other IP fax machines or entering e-mail addresses and sending IP faxes to e-mail inboxes. Also, recipients must have .TIFF image viewers and know how to use them.

With IP fax services, customers should be sure to select the appropriate services available to help provide for the best rates, particularly when originating calls from countries with very competitive telecom markets, where IP fax service charges might be significantly higher than the telephone service rates of traditional telephone service providers.

OVERALL BENEFITS OF IP FAX
This enterprise IP fax infrastructure will benefit the telecom manager by reducing the company's phone bill; the office equipment manager by facilitating the rollout of newer, more intelligent fax machines, scanners, and multi-functional devices; and the IT manager by unifying the management of fax traffic that originates both from desktops and fax devices.

But perhaps the biggest benefit of IP fax is the cost savings. IP fax can reduce a company's fax bill by 50 percent or more, due to the fact that 100 percent of intra-company faxes are delivered for free. For faxes to external companies, least-cost routing is easily deployed and significantly reduces the telecommunications bill.

Additional benefits include:

• The ability to turn analog fax transmissions into digital documents managed in the network.
• Central management of documents, which permits backup and recovery, archiving, reporting, and billing for fax transmissions. User ID, billing codes, and phone number verification can be included on sent faxes, if the administrator chooses.
• Central management of telecommunications resources reduces the number of phone lines required.

While standalone faxing may never completely disappear, IP faxing offers companies a more efficient way to transfer documents. Corporations are building huge IP infrastructures for messaging and other applications and expecting to use them someday for IP-based telephony services, including fax. That day will be here sooner than most think.

Thaddeus Bouchard is the director of product management for Omtool, Ltd., and can be reached for comment at bouchard@omtool.com. Headquartered in Salem, NH, Omtool designs, develops, markets, and supports open, client/server software solutions that automate and integrate communication throughout the enterprise. For additional information, please visit their Web site at www.omtool.com. For more information, contact Omtool at 800-886-7845.