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Neglecting Fax When Migrating to IP

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Transmission Error: Neglecting Fax When Migrating to IP

A business migrating to an IP-based unified communications solution cannot simply assume that its faxing processes will integrate smoothly and easily into the new environment.

All evidence suggests the PSTN is in its final days. Businesses and residences are disconnecting 700,000 POTs lines per month, in favor of newer technologies like VoIP. In a related trend, as more services become available via IP — voice, videoconferencing — businesses are moving to “Unified Communications” (UC), converging all voice and data into a centralized IP environment. But what happens to an organization’s fax processes in an IP migration? Most UC offerings include some fax functionality, so businesses assume the fax box is checked. But a business must examine what those features are, determine whether they are sufficient, and assess what level of resources the business will need to establish and maintain the new IP-based fax infrastructure. Often businesses discover, after costly attempts to integrate fax into an IP environment, that their faxing infrastructure should reside elsewhere, such as a cloud fax service.

For enterprises interested in a detailed overview of the steps and considerations involved in migrating all of their communications to IP, VoIP provider ShoreTel offers a handy introduction: Practical Advice for a Successful IP Telephony Design and Deployment.

The 33-page paper, which discusses how and why an enterprise would create an IP-based unified communications environment, mentions the word “voice” 50 times. The phrase “unified communications” itself makes two-dozen appearances. “Video” merits three-dozen mentions. Guess how many times you’ll find the word “fax” in this paper. Once. (Twice, actually, if you include the contact page, which lists ShoreTel’s own fax number.)

And how is fax mentioned in this essay on “unified communications?” Onsite support, ShoreTel argues, “may come in handy to explain how to… link up that lone overlooked fax machine.” “Lone” and “overlooked” — a telling description of what can happen to fax in a migration to IP.

Businesses today are focused on mission-critical communications — voice, Internet, email, video, mobile. In an enterprise-wide migration to a UC platform, fax can get lost, particularly if the IP provider promises that fax is “covered” in the new environment. But fax is not an afterthought. It remains an important communication tool — particularly for organizations whose vendors and customers insist on doing business by fax. So businesses migrating to IP are well advised to investigate the pros and cons of this protocol for all services they might migrate — including fax.

We’ll discuss here the reasons fax has become notoriously difficult to integrate into an IP environment and how a business can analyze a UC platform’s fax services against the business’s specific faxing needs. We’ll also discuss why the most sensible and cost-effective solution for a business might be to migrate all voice and data to IP except for fax — and instead find a better system for the organization’s business faxing.

“We will eventually see the PSTN retire and POTS lines disappear. Wireless connections proliferate, while the Telcos are turning off 700,000 old phone lines per month.”

— Research firm Delphi, Inc., 2010

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The Troubles with FoIP — Why Fax Often Doesn’t Work Well in an IP Environment

In an enterprise’s migration of voice and data services into an IP-based unified communications environment, why would fax be the sticking point? Are there really problems in such an upgrade that are unique to fax technology? Yes, several:

• ProtocolInteroperability Fax operates on several protocols — primarily

T.30 (which does not support faxing over IP) and T.38 (which does). Because there are hundreds of millions of fax machines in use today that can read only T.30 data, a fax-over-IP (FoIP) solution contacting such a fax number would need to convert the data from T.30 to T.38 for transmission, and then back to T.30 for the receiving fax machine. Although possible, this extra series of steps can create delays — which can ultimately cause the transmission to fail.

• TimingDelays Moving the fax function from the highly

standardized timing of the PSTN to an IP network can introduce three types of delays, any of which can end a fax transmission in failure:

1. JittrDelays This unevenness in speed of transmission is a

non-issue with analog fax lines. But because FoIP is packed-based, the technology tries to maintain the correct sequence of packets into which the full fax is split for transmission. If a fax’s lower-number packets are delayed in transit, a FoIP system might try to delay higher-number packets until the sequence can right itself.

2. NetworkDelays Because it travels over an IP network, packets

of a FoIP fax might traverse many nodes on the Internet before arriving at the recipient’s fax number. If any of these nodes experience technical issues or higher-than-normal traffic during transmission, those packets can take longer to arrive — sometimes resulting in a corrupted fax.

3. Protocol-ConversionDelays The work a FoIP fax must often to do convert

its data into a protocol suitable for IP-network travel (T.38) and then back into a protocol readable by the receiver’s fax machine (T.30) takes time. If the delay is long enough, the fax transmission can fail.

• PacketLoss In communications over IP networks, “dropping

packets” is still common. Here is where we see a stark contrast between

voice and fax communications over IP — underscoring why an IP platform can work well for voice and other types of communication, but not nearly as well for fax. If a packet drops during an IP-based voice call, the participants will hear dead air, or a “cutout,” for a fraction of a second. The VoIP call will continue, and perhaps the speaker will be asked to repeat a few words. A packet loss during a fax transmission, however — even just a 1% loss — can end the entire transmission in failure.

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Fax Functionality — Another Reason to Vet Your IP Platform Before Migrating Fax to it.

When converging its voice and data technologies into a single unified communications platform, an enterprise might be tempted to simply “throw fax in” as well, especially when the UC vendor points out that fax is part of the package. After all, much of an enterprise’s reason for moving to an IP network is to rid itself of its costly POTS phone lines. So it seems logical that fax, which in a large organization often requires many analog lines, should join the new IP environment.

But after the migration, for the reasons described above (and others), many businesses discover that an inordinate amount of IT resources are being tied up trying to establish the new IP-based fax infrastructure, to learn how to deal with the inevitable technical problems, and to ask for more features — features they assumed would be included in the IP fax service.

This is another reason it is so important for a business to fully investigate the fax functionality in the UC platform it plans to deploy — on the new IP platform, the business will often discover it lacks fax capabilities that it needs.

And because fax is among those “lone” and “overlooked” technologies, many businesses don’t even know how the majority of their employees actually use fax to conduct business. So we suggest a business considering an IP migration first conduct internal research to determine exactly how its staff uses fax — including what features the business’s fax users deem mission-critical — and then check that list against what’s offered in the new IP package.

Fax features your organization might need or want:

• The ability to digitally sign, edit, annotate and send a fax from a WiFi device (without printing)

• The ability to eliminate fax machines, fax servers, and related hardware and supplies

• Unique fax numbers for each employee — without using any analog fax lines

• The ability to send and receive faxes as email• Compatibility with SAP or other back-end data

systems• Highly secure faxing that protects sensitive data

and also aids with regulatory compliance• Online storage and retrieval of all faxed documents• Online fax functionality optimized specifically for

mobile devices • The ability to scale up and add fax numbers

quickly — without any additional hardware

Remember, moving services to an IP environment can be a smart way to centralize and allow for easier control of an organization’s disparate voice and data services. It can also help an organization eliminate hardware and save on other communications costs by leveraging the Internet for much of the network’s infrastructure. These can all be great reasons to migrate. But each communication service must still be at least as useful to the organization on the new IP environment as it was prior to the migration. In the case of fax, that means an IP-based fax infrastructure should give an enterprise at least the same functionality as it had before, without introducing new technological challenges. In that respect, FoIP still generally fails on both counts.

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The End of the Phone System: Why Businesses Need to Migrate Their Faxing to a New Technology Anyway

In its earnings report for third-quarter 2012, AT&T announced it would invest $14 billion in IP broadband infrastructure and related services. The telecom giant explained in the report that it expects that this sector — IP networks — will account for 90% of its future revenue. As a November DailyFinance article by John Grgurich (AT&T Wants to Cut the Cord on Your Landline Phone) points out, that same earnings report makes no mention of new investment in TDM.

For years, the industry has talked seriously about retiring the PSTN and replacing the entire analog phone infrastructure with IP-based networks. The FCC faces continual pressure from interest groups, including the major telecom providers themselves, to shut down the analog phone infrastructure. And the market seems so many steps ahead — millions of businesses and residences have already replaced their analog lines with wireless service — that perhaps the eventual PSTN shutdown will be a nonevent.The message to business is clear: The inevitable PSTN phase-out means organizations today relying on the public analog phone infrastructure for any of its communications, including fax, would be wise to begin investigating alternative technologies — sooner rather than later.

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SUMMARY

For an organization planning to migrate all of its voice and data service to an IP-based unified communications network, including its fax infrastructure on this new network seems logical. But there are at least two reasons such an organizations should thoroughly vet the unified communications service before entrusting that IP platform with its business faxing:

1) Technical Incompatibility Unlike other voice and data communications, fax

is a technology optimized for an analog channel. IP networks present unique technical challenges for fax transmission, and an enterprise that moves its fax processes over to IP before learning this can find itself wasting significant time and resources just trying to make its faxing work again.

2) Functional Inferiority Yes, many unified communications platforms

include fax. But an organization that relies on faxing for important business processes with vendors, customers or prospects should first learn just what “fax” includes in any new IP offering and if that functionality is sufficient — in terms of technical sophistication, flexibility, scalability, security, and even regulatory compliance.

Businesses moving to IP networks should avoid the temptation to say that fax, too, is “handled” by simply adding their fax infrastructure to the new unified platform they are building.

An IP network can represent a very smart communications solution, from both a technological and economic standpoint, for services such as videoconferencing and voice. For the unusual case of fax technology, however, a migration can also make sense, but the considerations must be different. IP networks pose many technical problems for faxing. At the same time, maintaining a costly fax infrastructure built on fax machines or servers and POTS phone lines severely limits an organization’s fax capability in terms of functionality and scalability — not to mention that the TDM technology on which this network is based is quickly being phased out.




So a third technology option makes the most sense for an enterprise’s fax infrastructure: a hosted, online fax service. Such a service saves an organization significantly on overall fax infrastructure costs and offers a rich feature set that can meet even the most demanding enterprise’s business fax needs. Moreover, an online fax service requires no hardware, ongoing maintenance or support from the enterprise’s IT staff. And hosted fax is the most secure faxing solution on the market.

So yes, converge your other communications services — from voice to email to video to mobile — onto an IP platform. But entrust your fax infrastructure only to the most technologically robust and cost-effective solution for business faxing.

COMPANY OVERVIEW

eFax Corporate is part of publicly traded j2 Global, Inc. (NASDAQ: JCOM) — the world’s leading provider of cloud-based, business-critical communications and storage messaging services.

Founded in 1995, j2 Global provides outsourced, value-added messaging and communications services to individuals and businesses around the world. The company offers fax, voicemail and document management solutions, Web-initiated conference calling and unified-messaging and communications services.

j2’s Global network spans more than 49 countries on six continents. Serving more than 12 million subscribers worldwide, j2 has offices in nine cities around the world, accepts payment in twelve currencies, and provides customer support in more than seven languages.

To learn more about eFax Corporate, please visit us at enterprise.efax.com.

You may contact our U.S. Enterprise Sales team at 888-532-9265 (toll free) or 323-817-1155 (direct). In the U.K. contact us at +44 (0) 8707 113311.

To learn more about j2 Global™, please visit http://www.j2global.com.

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