Traditional T.38 Doesn't Hold a Candle to HTTPS Fax

Despite technological advances, the vast majority of offices still depend on their fax machines, but as those same businesses are shifting to Voice over IP (VoIP) phone systems, they are finding there can be some difficulty in combining a traditional fax machine and VoIP.

As most of these businesses are finding out, VoIP connections are very unpredictable and add more latency than desired, resulting in an unacceptable amount of dropped calls. With this problem, it takes new, out-of-the-box thinking and use of a relatively new technology like HTTPS Fax.

Because fax technology was intended for analog networks, it tends to travel poorly on a VoIP network. It’s merely a signal issue, and using a closed network and T.38 could solve the problem.

But in most cases, the practicality of using T.38 on a closed network is not an option, and over the open Internet as VoIP Fax was meant to be, T.38 falls short as it is susceptible to packet loss and jitter defeating the purpose of VoIP Fax.

Another way to deal with a fax system is to connect the fax machine directly to a POTS line and bypass the VoIP system when making the switch, again defeating the purpose of VoIP Fax.

To address any latency, reliability and privacy issues, fax VoIP that leverages HTTPS should be put in place.

To that end, at this link the SIP Forum a truly technical forum, has developed standards, guidelines and investigates inoperability issues with the goal to resolve them. ,

While fax VoIP is only as secure as the methods put in place for users within an organization, HTTPS technology goes a long way to ensure interoperability and security issues are resolved.