Hello Everyone,
Its been a very long time since i haven’t blogged. Been too busy with office and other personal stuff.
Anyhow, as given in my previous post, this is the second part of the Unified communications protocols article. If you want to know about the basics of unified communications protocols, read the first part of this article. Otherwise, read on:
Fax Over IP (FOIP) :
As given in my previous article, unified communications is changing the face of telecommunications across the globe. In the first part, iv discussed about VOIP and its impact to society and the way we communicate with other people across the planet.
However, an equally and important concept is FOIP. With the advances in technology, it is possible to send and receive faxes securely via the Internet. This is done by Fax Over IP or FOIP as it is commonly called FOIP has been around for ages, but in the past, it didn’t usually compare to sending a real fax, where you could easily verify that the other party has received your fax. However, the latest generation of FOIP technology combines the benefits of traditional fax with integration into Internet technology.
The concept behind FOIP is transmission of data over a packet switched network such as the Internet, rather than a circuit-switched network such as the Plain Old Telephone System (PSTN or telephone network). This method of transfer reduces the resources taken for transmission and FOIP works using a protocol which converts fax documents into images and transmits them over the VOIP network. The receiving fax device interprets the image and converts it back into an analog based fax signal.
HOW FAX OVER IP (FOIP) WORKS
Faxing over IP networks can occur by the following types of transmission. These are:
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Inband Faxing – This method involves fax tones being digitally encoded by the coder-decoder (same codec) similar to voice and transmitted along the IP network. However, the use of low bit-rate codecs and in-efficient encoding of fax/modem tones and other non speech sounds have resulted in discontinued use of this method for use in transmission of faxes over IP networks, since this was deemed to be possible only through the use of higher bit-rate codecs (G.726R32 or G.711) which resulted in higher bandwidth consumption.
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Real time IP Faxing – This method involves the transmission of fax information as IP data packets using a high level Internet protocol called T.38, from Fax server to Fax server. The principle behind Real time IP faxing is that it uses the same protocol in phone-line faxing (T.30) for conversion and interpretation of image data, but transmits this data using T.38 . The use of T.38 eliminated the need for high bandwidth consumption in sending fax data as IP packets, and also ensured faster delivery times and reliability than Inband faxing. This provided significant cost savings, since users could use their existing internet connections to transmit and receive faxes without paying anything extra.
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Store and Forward Faxing – This method is considered as an advancement over real time faxing. Store and Forward Faxing uses T.37 (another high level Internet protocol), to convert scanned fax data to tagged image file format (TIFF) and transmit the data as email attachments.
That being said, fax transmissions over any IP network can be implemented in different combinations. These include:
FAX capable PC to Normal Fax Machine
IP Fax machine to Normal Fax machine
IP Fax machine to IP Fax machine
The above images were taken from http://home.howstuffworks.com/foip1.htm.
Consider the integration/use of VOIP, FOIP in your existing networks and save a lot of things, primarily bandwidth and money.
