[Asterisk-Users] FAX, IAX and *....Maybe I'm dreaming...:-)

[Olle E. Johansson]

ProvoCityPower wrote:

>  >Also who says Fax should ever be required on IP? My office has been
>  
> I'm fairly new here and don't mean to be contentious. We all have 
> different perspectives as to what VOIP should be. My goal is to replace 
> analog lines, not supplement them. I'm talking residential 

I am sure we all consider fax to be obsolete sometime soon. Meaning: when
this generation of businessmen die out ;-)

Supporting faxing over analogue lines to endpoints (clients) is important. However,
transmission of these audio streams over Internet or large private IP networks,
seems foolish. In most cases, there will be no guaranteed QoS, meaning that faxing
will or will not work from time to time. It would be better use of the network to
look into another architecture, where we decode the audio stream close to the fax device,
transmit it as a tiff file with attached routing, T.38 or something else (maybe SIMPLE) and
if the receiving end is another fax, encode it again into an fax audio stream.

TPC.int (http://www.tpc.int) is running a fax service we could look into. OpenH323 seems
to have work going on on T.38. We have work going on in regards to decoding and encoding
fax streams. We should be able to solve this.

I haven't looked into ENUM support for faxing, but it would be great if one could indicate
how an endpoint receives faxes, by email to a printer, by a fax audio stream or something else
(a courier delivering papers overnight with a fresh pizza attached ;-).

What we need is people who sees this as a big enough problem to roll up their sleaves and
work on it or open their wallets and pay someone to do it for the community.

/O