December 1997

Internet Fax: More Options, More Control For System Administrators

BY KAREN LIEN, OPEN PORT TECHNOLOGY

The promise of the Internet — to increase worker productivity and realize cost savings — is revealing itself through a workhorse standard of everyday business communication: fax. The Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) was once the only transport available for faxing, and that fact has led to a remarkable windfall for the telephone companies. Analysts say that the telcos have been benefiting to the tune of $92 billion a year. By moving the transmission of fax from expensive phone lines to the Internet, companies can expect to reduce fax expenses substantially. And, the integration of fax telephony on IP-based networks puts control of fax in the hands of system administrators who can help users more efficiently send and receive faxes.

Sending faxes from a fax machine over PSTN lines is a very anonymous activity. Faxes are sent at will with little accountability for allocating costs back to senders. According to a recent Gallup/Pitney Bowes study, fax accounts for over 40 percent of a typical company’s phone bill, which quickly adds up to over $15 million for a Fortune 500 organization. These figures are expected to climb by 12 percent this year.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM INTERNET FAX
Analysts have conservatively predicted that the market for Internet fax will grow dramatically over the next few years as corporations demand the convenience and cost savings that Internet faxing provides. What this means to a typical company is an increased selection of services, broadened faxing options, reductions in cost, and greater control over fax usage within the company.

Selection
As demand for Internet fax grows, you’ll have a greater selection of services to select from with various levels of service guarantees. Expect competition for your business to be fierce — beyond Internet fax service, you’ll look to the provider for additional services like Internet access, Web hosting, and more.

Broadened Fax Options
A top-notch Internet fax service will support the sending and receiving of faxes from a variety of applications and devices including fax machines, desktop computers, e-mail, and even mainframe applications. Depending on what service configuration is chosen, users could send and receive faxes on the Internet at their workstations, allowing them to easily manage fax broadcasts, forward received faxes, create custom cover sheets, and archive fax documents.

Cost Savings
A business-class Internet fax service will offer your company tremendous cost savings over traditional phone companies — between 35 and 50 percent for domestic and international traffic, and up to 80 percent less than fees charged by fax service bureaus. Pricing across the board will be less expensive per minute. And IP fax services may offer volume discount levels based on minutes used and fax destinations (domestic vs. international).

Control of Fax Usage
By treating fax as a data transmission, not a phone call, you’ll gain greater control over fax usage in your company. Desktop fax users send and receive messages through fax mailboxes, which can be monitored. This gives you information down to the level of the individual using fax, in particular, about when, where, and by whom faxes are sent — tracking the associated costs for each transmission. Unlike traditional PSTN faxing, an Internet fax service should offer tracking of fax status, delivery notification, and usage tracking, which gives network managers the ability to manage communications budgets more efficiently.

SELECTING AN INTERNET FAX SERVICE
All Internet fax services are not created equal. Many early entrants into the field are small, specialized companies that offer an inbound mailbox only — simply accepting faxes via a local phone call to a server that, in turn, routes faxes to their final destinations. Others have offered nothing more than the ability to fill in the text portion of a cover page, and send out one or two pages of text information only. When selecting an Internet fax service, apply the following checklist to make sure your company is getting the highest level of service available.

Network Infrastructure
Make sure your fax service provider has an extensive global network over which faxes are routed. Some services may toss your faxes on to the Internet at large where they have no control over routing or service levels. A quality service will either own or resell the network bandwidth on which your faxes are carried so you’re not subject to the variances of another carrier’s network. For example, Fairfax, VAbased UUNET Technologies (www.uu.net) owns more than 1,000 POP switching and routing facilities around the world — with its own dedicated bandwidth among all those sites. Its UUFAX service is guaranteed to route faxes exclusively on the vast UUNET network, not through the general Internet, so UUFAX customers will realize greater security, reliability, and a high quality of service.

Fax Services
At a minimum, your selected service should support fax sending and receiving from standalone fax machines, desktop PC applications, and email programs. Many services only allow you to send faxes from proprietary software installed on a PC with no receipt capabilities to a fax mailbox. Others allow you to receive but not send, and most do not support fax machines. Ideally, the service also offers Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) software that allows you to manage fax user accounts on servers at your office sites .

Fax Broadcasts
Is the fax service robust enough to handle both general business communication fax volumes and fax broadcasts?

Delivery Options, Inbound And Outbound
An enhanced Internet fax service is able to offer private, personal fax mailboxes, and multiple ways to deliver faxes to their recipients (e.g., fax, print, e-mail, application tie-in). For fax sending, an Internet enhanced fax service will offer high priority, offpeak, and timed delivery options, with the ability to assign a billing code to each fax, for charge-back purposes.

Security
The service provider should employ strict user authentication methods before the service can be accessed. Adaptable To Changing Needs The service should easily scale to support changes in your corporation’s fax volumes.

IDEAL INTERNET FAX TECHNOLOGY FOR ISPs
For an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to meet the Internet fax requirements outlined above, they must have made a long-term commitment to deploying a business-class IP-based fax service. The service should be built on fax technology that takes advantage of IP protocols and an existing network infrastructure . A properly configured Internet fax service allows the service provider to offer:

• High Performance.
• Massive scalability through modularity.
• Manageability.
• Interoperability.
• Global telephony capability.
• Universal mailbox.
• Enabled endusers.

High Performance
Faxes need to move quickly and easily around a service provider’s network. Fax processing needs to be distributed among software components to increase response time and eliminate bottlenecks. Centralized message administration servers, located at an ISP’s Network Operations Center (NOC), should handle the administration of fax traffic, as well as the routing and transport of faxes as needed by the ISP’s network architecture.

At the POPs, fax communication servers in combination with remote access servers, provided by companies like Ascend and 3COM, should handle delivery and receipt of off-net traffic destined for, or received from, the PSTN. Maintenance for the entire faxenabled system can be performed in the same manner as other maintenance functions performed by NOC personnel.

Massive Scalability Through Modularity
A fully distributed system provides the service provider tremendous scalability to efficiently manage the fax system through the flexibility of the modules. “Fully distributed” means the modules are logically connected, not tied to any specific location. The module functions could be distributed across multiple servers, so more than one server could be dedicated to running a single process. For example, an ISP should provide the ability to convert documents from various formats (e.g., word processing or spreadsheet documents) to fax representation. This CPU-intensive conversion process should be isolated as a module, and replicated as often as needed so as not to slow down other processes.

Manageability
Service providers should be able to administer a fax service according to existing administration models, either centralized or decentralized management at the ISP’s discretion. That way, impact to the network as a whole is minimized because fax is just another application, like e-mail or Web hosting, that rides on the network. Ultimately, administration cost-savings can be passed down to end-users. Billing and other administration functions are also easier to manage.

Interoperability
Service providers must deploy technology that is interoperable and readily adaptable to potential Internet standards that are still being discussed. Interoperability extends to the enduser level as well. An ideal IP fax solution supports popular operating platforms used by corporations, and allows customers to connect to the Internet fax service with their currently deployed hardware and software.

Global Telephony Capability
In most cases, a final dial-out phone call from the Internet will be placed to deliver a fax to its final destination. An Internet fax service must be based on technology that expertly supports offnet, telephone-based transactions (including analog and T1/E1 telephony protocols) throughout the world.

Universal Mailbox
By establishing universal mailbox services now, an ISP is positioned at the forefront of the transition as traditional telephony moves to the Internet. The concept of “universal access to universal messages” is becoming a reality. An ISP could later extend the integration of computer telephony by layering additional messaging types like voice and video on to the fax service.

Enabled EndUsers
ISPs need to offer network managers the broadest possible range of fax management services. CPE software as described earlier in this article is the key to that flexibility. Organizations may choose all or parts of a CPE system suite to suit their specific needs. Companies may wish to have a LAN-based fax server at their site, allowing local user administration and mailbox storage, while outsourcing the transport, and saving money. Users will want to both send and receive faxes from fax machines and desktops through fax client interfaces or e-mail. An Internet fax service needs to be able to handle huge amounts of fax traffic.

CONCLUSION
This is an exciting time for corporations to take advantage of the competitive environment Internet telephony brings to the market. We are truly at a technology crossroads where companies can make decisions now that will position them smartly for the future. Fax is the logical first choice to begin transitioning telephony data from the PSTN to the Internet. Investments made now to tap into the tremendous productivity and cost-savings gain achieved through Internet fax will be leveraged in the long term for future messaging strategies. By carefully selecting service provider partners now for Internet fax, companies are poised to realize the benefits that the integration of the Internet and telephony will bring in the near future.

Karen Lien is director of marketing communications at Open Port Technology. Open Port develops enterprise-class fax messaging software to support mission-critical and high-volume fax applications for Network and Internet Service Providers (NSPs/ISPs) and large corporations. The systems combine Open Port software, industry-standard fax and server hardware, and a corporation’s WAN and Internet connection to produce an IP-based solution that streamlines fax processing and significantly reduces costs. For more information, call Open Port Technology at 312-867-5000 or visit the company’s Web site at www.openport.com.