[Asterisk-Users] Which asterisk-friendly cards are fax-capable?

[Tom Rymes]

On Oct 12, 2005, at 6:33 PM, trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 18:18 -0400, Tom Rymes wrote:
>
>> On Oct 12, 2005, at 11:26 AM, Lee Howard wrote:
>>
>>> If your PRI comes in to a TE405P or somesuch then you can pass fax
>>> DIDs out through another port on the TE405P and out to a T1
>>> faxmodem (such as a Patton 2977) or a T1 channel bank and then to
>>> analog modems.
>>>
>>
>> Good call, Lee. Unfortunately, we only have a single port Sangoma
>> card in our asterisk server. In order to do what you suggest, I would
>> have to buy a dual port card and a channel bank or T1 modem. Thats
>> more $$$ than is warranted by our fax traffic.
>>
>> Also, given reports of problems related to frame-slippage and other
>> weirdness encountered when sending data/fax through Asterisk, I'm
>> reluctant to invest that money. Have you tried this setup yourself?
>>
>
> Cant iaxmodem work by having asterisk bridge the pri channel as needed
> (did based routing perhaps) and then have hylafax use iaxmodem as the
> modem it uses.  That should result in no additional hardware, which
> means testing can happen with little cost to see if it works for you.
>
> As I understand it iaxmodem just acts like a modem, and doesnt  
> actually
> do the processing that hylafax does, so the two would work together
> instead of one or the other.  I may be wrong on this, but that is the
> way it looks to me so far.

This is true, but:

1.) Lee has stated that IAXModem is still "Developer-grade" code.
2.) I don't have a spare PRI for testing, and our phone system is far  
too mission critical for me to go mucking about with it and trying  
this out (especially given #1, above).
3.) It will not be easy for me to test out this setup without simply  
switching our production HylaFAX server to use IAXModem, which I am  
again reluctant to do, seeing as it is our production server and we  
depend on it. Testing fax service setups is notoriously difficult due  
to the huge number of different fax machines, etc that are out there.

Tom