[asterisk-users] Fax with Asterisk + Hylafax

[Jon Pounder]

> 2007/4/16, Stephen Bosch <posting at vodacomm.ca>:
>>
>>
>> It's not entirely clear to me why people continue to cling to the idea
>> that Asterisk should handle faxing also. What's the benefit? Hylafax is
>> great, and you can even use it on the same machine.
>
>
> The benefit, I guess, is to save a dedicated line and not changing
> incoming
> fax numbers, as you cannot port them individually.
> But you're right to point it also has drawbacks ...

saving the dedicated line is the biggest one, the next notch is what about
when you have busy periods of 5min a month, do you get a second dedicated
fax machine, fax line, hunt group etc ?


we just give out line 2 in our hunt group as the fax number, have
autodetect on the lines in asterisk and switch to the fax extension
(channel bank with faxmodem and hylafax) when a fax comes in. this gives
us an incoming fax pool as well with no extra line cost. This actually
works fairly well through a channel bank even with all the extra d/a a/d
conversion going on. We plan to try the soft fax channels as well but have
not tried that yet.

if someone has problems (pretty rarely), then we tell them the extension
of the faxmodem to dial, we also have a real fax machine on another
extension we have them try calling. That always works and the extra
switching does not impact the faxes themselves. The biggest issue is
remote does not talk to usr faxmodem, but will talk to a real fax machine,
nothing about the asterisk detection and switching usually matters.

we have never done it yet but the faxes could use all the lines at night
for mass faxouts or certain lines or whatever since its all connected that
way already anyway.

lots of the benifits are not possible with a dedicated fax line. as for
the drawbacks you could make a lot of the same arguments about voip in
general but people still use it anyway.

forgetting about voip and virtual channels and asterisk for a minute, why
is it so hard to find a faxmodem that actually works as reliably as a
physical fax machine ? Should be simple, but I guess it will eventually
lead to it just becoming software only when the hardware manufacturers
can't get it right.




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Jon Pounder

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