Just the Fax: Digium Announces Fax for Asterisk

Writing on the company’s blog, self-described “Digium (News - Alert) employee number 4” Malcolm Davenport shared an interesting tidbit:

 

“If you ask Google about faxing for Asterisk (News - Alert), with the search keywords Asterisk and fax, and you ask Google to omit similar entries, you’ll end up with 52 pages of results.

 

“If you ask Google (News - Alert) how many times fax has been mentioned on an Asterisk mailing list, by setting the site parameter to lists.digium.com, then Google tells you there are 1,120 utterances.

 

“Yesterday, if you asked Digium for help in faxing documents through Asterisk, we’d have apologized and said that we didn’t offer a fax solution for Asterisk,” wrote Davenport.

 

Well that lack of a fax solution from Digium, the creators of Asterisk, is now a thing of the past.

 

The company has announced the availability of Fax for Asterisk. The offering provides Asterisk users and integrators a suite of user-friendly applications and a licensed version of the industry-leading fax modem software from Commetrex.

 

Describing the new offering as “a complete, cost-effective platform for the development of fax solutions,” Digium’s vice president of product management Bill Miller (News - Alert) said, “Asterisk users, developers and integrators now have a toolkit allowing them to integrate fax with their phone systems.”

 

While fax solutions based on Asterisk are not new in and of themselves, direct support from Digium has not previously been available.

 

According to the official press announcement, Fax For Asterisk interoperates with standards-compliant fax machines connected to Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6 on x86 Linux systems. It provides low-speed PSTN faxing via DAHDI-compatible telephony interface cards as well as VoIP faxing to T.38-compatible SIP end points and service providers. Fax For Asterisk operates at speeds up to 14.4kbps and supports V.17, V.27 and V.29 fax modems.

 

The Fax For Asterisk solution is available online from Digium’s Web store and for users interested in a single concurrent fax session the license is free of charge. Multi-session licenses are available for a one-time fee of $38.50 per channel.

 

“With Fax For Asterisk,” Miller added, “Digium offers a reliable and fully supported fax solution.”