Provider for Voip FAX to physical machine (not efax)

Please rember that hylafax has been working before asterisk got pink pants

Not disagreeing with much of any of that, but if you are looking at providers anyway, Voip Innovations also offers inbound and outbound soft FAX services. Just another opportunity for some variation.

Hmm… I’ll just leave this here: https://www.sangoma.com/products/faxstation/

I’ve been using VOIP.ms with Grandstream ATA devices with little to zero issues for a year plus.

Outside of that, I have been using Cox provided POTS lines (we all know they are VOIP on the back end). Late last year, and twice this year, I had major issues sending and receiving faxes. In my case it ended up being line noise introduced by a neighboring location. It took Cox 4 days to finally locate and resolve the issue. The second and third times weren’t nearly as long to solution, but again, were noisey neighbors on the cable line.
One of the larger issues to shared network.

Hello All,
I had the same issue. Due to budget restraints (what budget), and to save money by removing the old copper lines I had to setup a Grandstream ATA to connect to our VOIP trunk.
We still need the Modem facility due to our Fuel System using a modem to download remote fuelings for vehicles, and for the very rare fax to banks… however Freepbx does an excellent job of receiving :slight_smile:
It took me a while to get working and it was counter intuitive for me.
Sometimes it would work but would mostly fail halfway during transfers.

On the Grandstream HT801 leave most of your settings as default and just change the following.
Fax Mode: Pass-Through
Re-INVITE after Fax Tone Detected: Enabled
Jitter Buffer Type: Fixed
Jitter Buffer Length: Low
G723 Rate:6.3kbps
Use First Matching Vocoder in 200OK SDP:Yes (Mine is PCMU)
Voice Frames per TX: 2
iLBC Frame Size: 20ms

some of these may be default but not the Jitter Buffer. It’s that which killed it for me.

My SIP Trunk provider has an average ping of 14.7ms with usually 0 jitter through our Leased Line (50/50mbps).
Our second Site connects uses another Granstream ATA with identical settings but its own extensions.
It connects to our on-site Server through a FTTC line averaging 24ms ping, jitter is present but not crazy.

I now get very rare fails. Hope it helps :slight_smile:

I’m pretty sure that ANY jitter buffer above 0 is a “REALLY BAD THING FOR FAXES” T38 is unaffected, G711/T30 will choke on any ‘stutter’ which is intrinsic to JB’s

Your right but the grandstream unfortunately doesn’t have an off setting.

Try VOIP.MS. They have local servers all over the country.

HTTPS Fax Adapters- These have flaws like delays, and it will tell you a fax went through when it really didn’t. Both of these things make these adapters unreliable. I’ve still got about 20 or so out there that I will be moving to T38.

G711 will Fail with something as little as a 2% packet loss or any amount of real Jitter. I definitely don’t recommend even trying this. I have more details on G711/Modem stuff but I won’t bore you.

T38 works extremely well if setup properly, and if you can step the fax machine down to 14400, after months, years of perfecting T38. I’ve finally make a new breakthrough tonight actually and I’ve got it working really reliably with 4 different carriers. Ran about 100 test faxes through today to different numbers. I even combined this new breakthrough with the FreePBX Trunk Balancing Module. So now instead of it going through the same carrier every time, I can have the trunks round robin. So when the fax machine sends it’s retries…it will try to go out several different carriers in case one has a bad route. When you try the same route over and over again and expect a different result…LOL. Some Fax machines allow you to set retries to 14 times. If you don’t want to mess with adjusting the fax baud rate to 14400, you can use a T38 Relay like audiocodes which will step the speed down for you before sending to freepbx.

Online only HIPPA Compliant Fax Providers. Like the FaxAge and SRFax. Great if they work reliably. Pricing is much better than someone like E-Fax. Still expensive though.

Copper Lines/ISP lines…Someone else’s problem and $30-$50 for unlimited calling.

Over the years, i chose hylafax+ and t38modems bypassing any intermediary (like asterisk), it worksat least 3 nines with any real T38 provider the failures comparable to t30 to the same numbers, t38modem is almost impossible to compile on RH though , use a 5 dollar vultr/do Debian instance and just apt install t38modem You also get trivial email2fax/fax2emailVworking with a few hours of RTFM

Yes, I use these. Are there delays, sure but that’s due to how the devices work. The fax machines are only talking to the devices not the far side. This means the devices does not require Internet for the fax machine to send faxes to it. The device will answer the fax machine and accept the faxes, spooling them. When the device detects the Internet again, it will reach out and it will not only pull the incoming faxes stored at the server, it will then deliver the spool it has in memory.

At the same time if the Internet is down, incoming faxes can sent to numerous emails/SMS destinations when the device isn’t connected. So they still have their inbound faxes during an outage and still have email-to-fax abilities for sending. Oh and they still have the web portal to do all this in. The HTTPS fax devices are for just connecting the fax machine to all that. It’s ancillary.

Let’s not forget that T.38 isn’t a codec it encapsulates the data so you still need to do T.38 over g711 for the best result. Also the fact that it doesn’t matter the method, FAX has been (even when it was copper only) and will continue to be a Best Effort service. Even a copper fax line is always considered best effort.

I’ve been doing fax services for over 15+ years from copper to g711 pass-thru to T.38 to digital services that support HTTPS based devices. I have spent equal time trouble issues over copper and over SIP/T.38 over the years. And let’s be honest here copper is touchy, literally. Exposed copper, touching copper, bad wiring, connections, jumpers, etc all can degrade the quality of the fax service over the copper.

Unlike SIP/T.38 where you can adjust some settings on the adapter, platform or even the fax machine to help deal with things. If you’ve got static happening over your copper fax line, you need to actual trace down that bad connection which could be in a freaking wall.

Also, true story, it is now very rare for anything to be 100% copper from A to Z. At best you’re getting it in the last mile. So that POTS line you got for your fax machine, it’s copper to you but it ain’t copper all the way back to the CO or out to the PSTN.

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