[asterisk-users] RE: Bottom line on fax reception

[Darrick Hartman]

Tim Litwiller wrote:
> Greg Kennedy wrote:
>>
>> I gave up on the rxfax business as it never worked for me. I use 
>> iaxmodem and hylafax and it works perfectly, every single time i use 
>> it. inbound or outbound doesnt matter.
>> I have not read about anyone using iaxmodem and hylafax having any 
>> issues. and its fairly easy to setup. Took me about 1 hour total to 
>> get everything installed and configured.
>>
> Where is a how to on this and does it pass thru to a fax machine?  
> I've been fighting with getting faxing to work on my home asterisk 
> machine and have given up.  But if you say it works well and reliably 
> on large volume I'd be willing to try again on my home machine.
>
> We get a quite low volume of faxes 10 or less per week. But they are 
> how my wifes  family communicates and when our fax does work we start 
> to loose contact with them, so she would argue that we should go back 
> to plain old telephones. 
Fax reception does work reliably IF (big IF) you are faxing using a 
transport media that is conducive to faxing.  The internet is not a 
transport method that will result in 100% reliable connectivity.  If 
you're on a reasonably good internet connection with low-latency and 
jitter between you and your voip service AND you are using ulaw, you 
should get acceptable results for residential purposes.  I've connected 
my Brother MFC to a Digium TDM400 card and successfully sent and 
received faxes over the internet in the past.  I've also had my share of 
failures with the same connection when a large file was being 
downloaded, even with traffic shaping enabled. 

People need to be VERY clear about this when they say they are faxing 
successfully through Asterisk.  Lee has all sorts of ammunition why you 
shouldn't even try it over IP, at least not in a business setting.

Darrick

-- 
Darrick Hartman
DJH Solutions, LLC
http://www.djhsolutions.com