[OT] Re: [Asterisk-Users] TE410P / Eicon PRI

[Darren Nickerson]

 > Furthermore, even if you assumed that spandsp was as stable as HylaFAX,
> there is a vast feature-set difference between them as far as the
> faxing itself goes.  Steve has already made it clear that he sees no
> future in fax, and that he does not intend to bridge that feature-set
> gap at all.

I'd like to amplify that, and make at least one serious comment on this
thread.

First of all, the fact that fax isn't rocket science has led all manner of
goofballs to engineer devices that take great liberty with the standards,
... and that fail in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. The low barrier
to entry, combined with the ubiquity of fax technology, means that any
_industrial_ fax application needs an extremely robust T.30 engine at its
core if it's going to be taken seriously. There's just SO MUCH CRAP to
contend with out there.

Fact: fax is easy to do poorly, and difficult to do extremely well

I know what you're going to say ... my $75 toshiba fax machine does it well,
it can't be hard! That may be true, but consider how many people, how much
R&D and how much intellectual property is tied up in their fax T.30 engine,
and you can see there's a reason desktop fax machines generally fax much
more reliably than, for instance, faxmodems (which are generally crap).

Spandsp's rxfax and txfax could one day be suitable for mission-critical use
(even if they _do_ have the capability to take down asterisk), but today
they're not quite there. I certainly would not base a business on this
technology. It's a very cool tool for hobbyists right now .. .a classroom
exercise on how to do faxing from first principles and a way to illustrate
the power of a much more generally useful technology, namely spandsp itself
which is, quite simply, awe inspiring.

As Lee has highlighted, the author does not plan to flesh out the fax
implementation. If our customers were to implement spandsp many of them
would be facing monthly phone bills that are _thousands_ of dollars higher
than what they're presently paying thanks to the superior feature set in
dedicated Eicon and Brooktrout fax boards, or even in HylaFAX's own Class 1
implementation. Anyone who has studied the economics of faxing will know
that the up-front cost generally pales in comparison to the ongoing cost of
telco charges and administrative headaches if lots of faxes are failing.

Sure, HylaFAX itself if a wonderful platform for mission-critical or
enterprise faxing. It also has a very robust scheduler which is highly
configurable, that scales well (we routinely send batches of a half-million
faxes with no problems at all), and it generally does everything you could
ever want a fax system to do, with the lots of hooks for anything more ...
eccentric. But features and functionality are only worth something if you
need them, and as some people have rightly pointed out, some people don't
need anything more than fax reception, PDF conversion, and mailing. To those
people who then conclude spandsp is the right way to go, I say you're
missing the point - you need to look much deeper into the heart of the
matter.
How good are txfax and rxfax at coping with real-world fax freakishness?

Personally, I think it's a shame spandsp's author doesn't think fax is sexy
like we do.

-The Undertaker

--
Darren Nickerson
Senior Sales & Support Engineer
iFax Solutions, Inc. www.ifax.com
darren.nickerson at ifax.com
+1.215.438.4638
+1.215.243.8335 (fax)