| IP Fax Opportunities For ISPs BY
T. KENT ELLIOTT
According to a recent Gallup/Pitney Bowes survey, the average
Fortune 500 company spends between $15–20 million annually on telecommunications
services. Thirty-six per-cent of that cost is for fax transmissions, which translates to
an average of $7,000 per fax machine per year. Although 56 percent of this traffic is
intra-company, only 20 percent of companies use their private data networks for fax
transmission — which means all of this intra-company communication is going out over
the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Many companies aren’t aware of these
costs, and therefore have no control over them. Giving companies control of these costs
represents the next major opportunity in value-added Internet services — offering
enterprise fax services over IP networks.
WHO BENEFITS FROM IP FAX
The ability to piggyback fax traffic with the rest of a
company’s IP traffic has multiple benefits. Companies can save significant amounts of
money by taking fax traffic off the PSTN, particularly that 56 percent of fax traffic that
is intra-company. Companies can also monitor and control fax traffic just as they monitor
and control their data traffic.
For service providers, fax over IP is a logical next step in their business-oriented
service offerings. By coming up with the right solution, service providers can solve a
multi-million dollar problem for corporations and create a multi-million dollar revenue
source for themselves.
BARRIERS TO ADOPTION
With such an obvious problem and an available solution, why
isn’t the market for fax over IP already in high gear? Because corporations will not
give up their existing solutions, no matter what the cost or limitations, if certain
criteria are not met. And, service providers will not jump into a new market unless their
investment and growth criteria are met.
Corporate Criteria
For corporations, adoption criteria include efficient utilization
of their data networks, so that fax traffic will not cannibalize already strained
bandwidth. If a company has used a conventional TDM (Time Division Multiplex) network to
support their intra-company fax, then their experience is that each fax transmission
requires a dedicated 64 Kbps channel — that isn’t much of an argument for fax
over IP. However, a fax transmission at 9,600 bps should only consume about 10 Kbps on an
IP network.
While corporations will be interested in fax over IP because it overcomes some of the
problems of their existing solutions (it saves money and adds control), they will want to
preserve all the positive attributes they associate with a conventional stand-alone fax
environment. These benefits include the ability to do real-time, point-to-point fax
transmission (not just volume or off-hours batch fax transmissions); no retraining for
end-users; and the ability to work with all of the company’s existing equipment,
including fax machines, PBX equipment, and IP networks. In addition, although companies
probably have no way of knowing how reliable their existing stand-alone fax systems are,
they will certainly want their fax over IP solution to demonstrate high reliability as
well.
Service Provider Criteria
Service providers, too, have their own criteria for jumping into
the fax over IP business. While they can appreciate the benefits of fax over IP as a
revenue- generating service that can help differentiate them from their competitors, it
still represents an investment in equipment, training, and marketing. Service providers
will want to be sure they have a modular, scalable system that enables them to enter the
market with a minimal investment, and that will let them grow quickly as the technology
takes off. They will require a technical solution that interfaces with their existing
equipment. Finally, they will want a carrier-level solution that meets their standards for
reliability and their administrative requirements for billing and tracking.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
Do all the technical solutions on the market meet the criteria of
corporate users and service providers? Fax over IP is a relatively new market, so there
aren’t that many vendors upon which to judge technical trends. There are several
major vendors offering enterprise fax, but these store-and-foward products simply offer a
complementary technology to fax over IP that works well for volume or batch-oriented fax
traffic.
There are some baseline technical requirements for a fax over IP system. First, the
technology must be part of a multi-service solution. Fax over IP is the lowest risk
application for service providers to launch. Once it has been implemented, though,
customers will want to move other services over to the IP network as well, such as voice,
and video and data conferencing.
Second, the technology must support real-time, point-to-point fax transmission.
Corporations don’t want to change their faxing paradigm just to save money and gain
more control. The traffic that needs to be harnessed is real-time fax transmission from
individual to individual. Companies do not want to replace their installed base of fax
machines, and end users don’t want to relearn how to send faxes. In order to support
real-time point-to-point fax transmission, the architecture of the fax over IP solution
will have to separate the packetizing of the fax traffic from host-related functions such
as routing and authentication.
Finally, the technology must be able to dynamically differentiate fax from voice
traffic. If the fax over IP solution can’t differentiate fax from voice, companies
will have to dedicate lines and ports for each type of traffic. This will make it very
difficult and costly to add more and more end users to the system.
The question is not whether widespread fax over IP will arrive, but rather how quickly
it will arrive. That will depend on how soon vendors develop solutions that meet all of
the criteria listed above. When they do, corporations will be willing to commit their fax
communications, and service providers will be willing to commit their investment dollars.
The payback will be enormous. Service providers will gain a whole new revenue stream
and competitive differentiation. Corporations will save large amounts of money, and will
be able to control a significant portion of business communications which today is
completely uncontrollable. When it comes to Internet services, it doesn’t get much
more "value-added" than that.
T. Kent Elliott is president and CEO of Vienna
Systems Corporation. Vienna Systems, a Newbridge Networks affiliate, is a privately held
company based in Kanata, Ontario that designs and manufactures server-based hardware and
software products to handle voice, data, and video calls across IP networks, both
corporate (intranet) and public (Internet). For more information, contact the company at
613-591- 3219, or visit their Web site at www.viennasys.com.
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