[Asterisk-Users] Fax service (instead of tdm card)

[Rich Adamson]

> > Sorry if this is too far off-topic, it sounds potentially  
> > interesting to others though.  I'll be brief.
> >
> > Rich Adamson wrote:
> >
> >> I gave up (for now) trying to make spandsp work with the digium TDM
> >> card. Instead, I signed up with www.trustfax.com at a cost of $9.95
> >> per year plus $.10/page.  Since we only deal with an estimated 120
> >> pages per year, the total cost of about $22/year seemed like a very
> >> reasonable alternative. (At least until we can find out why the TDM
> >> card does not function properly with spandsp.)
> >>
> 
> I've just started playing with FAX, and I think  I've got a solution
> that seems to work pretty well, others might want to try.
> 
> Some background: We don't send or receive large numbers of faxes,
> and I run * on a slightly underpowered box (1Ghz Nemiah) so
> I was very wary of running spandsp and tiff etc on the * box, given
> that it has an E1 to manage and also does some transcoding to
> GSM and G729.
> 
> As an experiment I plugged a spare port on a Sipura 2000 into the
> modem socket of my Apple G5, configured the sipura and * to
> only use alaw (the native codec of my E1 that goes into my * box),
> configured * to send a spare DID to that sipura port
> and told Macos X that it had a fax modem.
> 
> So I now have a solution which seems to work well.
> The really cute thing is that the Apple presents the outbound fax
> as a unix postscript printer, so any computers in the office
> can print to it and send faxes!
> Inbound the faxes get converted to PDF and
> can be sent to email, printer or file,
> or any mix of the above.
> 
> The only problem is night time faxes (from folks in other
> timezones). I put the G5 in sleep mode when I leave the office.
> In theory it should be possible to have the G5 wake up
> from sleep mode when the fax line rings, but it seems to be
> too slow for the sipura or something, the first attempt fails,
> but if the sender retries before the G5 goes back to sleep,
> then it works fine.
> 
> Given that the imac minis are only a few hundred dollars,
> I thought this might be a solution that people would be interested in.

The context for the original posting was ~$20/year (with the choice of
several different service providers) is a reasonable alternative
to using spandsp with the "TDM analog card". E1/T1 users are not
necessarily subjected to the same problems as the TDM analog card.

The use of the "TDM analog card" implies a small (typically soho)
one-to-four pstn line asterisk system where the quantity of faxes 
is fairly low, and seems to be a rather prevalent system for lots 
of US users. With such an external service provider, there is one 
less need for an analog pstn line dedicated to faxes (regardless
of what is hanging on the end of the analog pstn line).