The Better Mousetrap for Fax Over IP

By Steve Adams

Back in the days before playing games with your friends required a $2,500 computer with a high speed processor, a minimum 17 inch monitor, and a broadband Internet connection, one of the more popular pastimes was a Milton Bradley creation called Mousetrap. In this game, players moved around a board and competed with one another to build an incredibly complex contraption that, when triggered, would eventually cause a trap to come down to capture an opponent’s mouse. The net result was a very complicated solution to a fairly simple and straightforward problem.

IT managers who are attempting to move their networks from a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solution are finding they have their own version of the Mousetrap game in a ride-along technology: faxes. Unlike voice traffic, which has a fairly straightforward method of transmission and can afford a little latency or drop-off while the packets are being sent, a drop-off or other problem during a fax might mean the entire message is scrapped. As a result, IT managers are finding they have to create complex, time-consuming workarounds in order to do what they used to do by plugging a fax machine (or fax server) into a phone port.

What’s really frustrating is that spending all that time working to send faxes over an IP network is really a case of the tail wagging the dog. While faxes are still very important to many industries – real estate, insurance, financial, legal, healthcare, and manufacturing come to mind – the ratio of faxes to voice traffic still heavily favors voice. Yet if the business goal is to eliminate phone lines and the subsequent costs that go with them, then faxes must also be accommodated. Otherwise it could become very difficult to keep business moving.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this dilemma: Internet fax services. They provide the benefits of FoIP – in reality they are FoIP – but without the need to become an expert in faxing protocols such as T.30 and T.38 or the g.711 codecs.

With an Internet fax service, all the real heavy lifting of establishing the call, negotiating the handshake between faxing devices, encoding the message for transmission, message correction and synchronization, terminating the call, etc. is handled off-site. The only responsibility the organization using the fax service has is making sure there is an Internet connection – something that falls within normal operating procedures of the day.

Another advantage that can’t be underestimated by over-burdened IT departments is the simplicity of operation from the user’s perspective. Users have the choice of sending and receiving faxes through their e-mail accounts, or via a secure server. If they use an e-mail account, it is generally as easy as sending an e-mail with an attachment. Only in this case, clicking the Send button forwards the e-mail to the service, which then converts it into a format that can be transmitted over normal phone lines without worries about lost packets or “jitter.” Received faxes come in as attachments to an e-mail message.

If users choose to send and receive faxes via a secure server they simply login to the server and follow similar procedures. Either way, the user interface incorporates familiar tools, making it easy for users to get up and running quickly, with little or no training.

One other timesaving advantage comes in the provisioning of an Internet fax service versus an internal FoIP application. With the internal application, a great deal of work goes into assigning, enabling, and testing the faxing capability. A great deal more goes into solving the compatibility and other technical problems that inevitably occur.

With an Internet fax service, a personal telephone number is assigned to each user by the service, and users create their own online logins. No interaction is required by the IT department other than authorizing its use on corporate desktops. Users are up and running the day it’s authorized, with no impact on internal IT resources.

While building the contraption for the Mousetrap game may have been “hours of fun for the entire family” as the ads would say, spending time creating complex workarounds just so the organization can send and receive faxes without a PSTN is not. Nor is it necessary.

An Internet fax service allows organizations to accomplish the same thing faster, easier, and for a lower cost, all without placing a burden on the IT department. It’s definitely the better mousetrap for faxing.

Steve Adams is Vice President of Marketing for MyFax (www.myfax.com), a provider of Internet faxing services for individual home users, small businesses, and large corporations. MyFax has won a number of awards in head-to-head competitions for ease of use, reliability, and best overall value. He can be reached at sadams@protus.com.