Companies across every industry have been rapidly adopting unified communications (UC) solutions. However, if your company is late to the party, you might be unsure as to what to make of all the new technical jargon being thrown about. In this article, we’ll take a brief look at some of the basics behind Fax over IP, or FoIP, to bring you up to speed.
Today, Internet traffic is routed using what are known as IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. Faxing over IP, therefore, is simply a method of sending faxes over the Internet.
In the past, faxes were sent as analog signals over a circuit-switched telephone network. This proved to be both slow and costly. On the other hand, the Internet uses digital IP packets, which are transmitted quickly and cheaply to all corners of the globe. With Fax over IP, data from a document is digitized and separated into smaller packets that are then transmitted over the same network as e-mail, YouTube (News - Alert) videos, and other Web content. This makes the transmission cost the same as an e-mail.
Fax over IP technology piggy-backs off of VoIP, or Voice over IP, technology. You guessed it – VoIP is simply voice data transmitted over the Internet. It was designed to allow businesses and consumers to use their internet connection as a low-cost phone line. It is possible to send faxes using a VoIP server, but there are several issues making it both unreliable and inefficient. Primarily, IP fax data requires more bandwidth (essentially Internet carrying capacity) than voice data, so a new communications protocol was developed specifically for FoIP. This is the T.38 protocol.
You may be wondering how a T.38-capable IP fax machine can communicate with traditional fax machine. This requires the use of a FoIP gateway, which will convert fax information from analog to digital, and vice-versa, and then route the data to the destination machine. This allows businesses to keep their traditional fax machines while still reaping the benefits of FoIP technology. Otherwise, so long as both fax machines are T.38 capable (via a fax card or fax software), no additional hardware is required.
Products such as Sagemcom’s (News - Alert) XMediusFax offer not only efficient T.38 fax services, but also address issues such as security, advanced integration, monitoring and reporting, and disaster recovery. TMCnet recently covered how and why these FoIP capabilities are important. Hopefully this short briefing has helped you make sense of the technical details, as well.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey