For those of you out there who simply can’t imagine your lives without fax, you can sleep well tonight knowing this technology isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Businesses today in ever industry imaginable still heavily rely upon fax for multiple reasons, including the fact that important documents can be sent with a signature just by scanning and then e-mailing them, they are extremely easy to use and configure, and can help reduce the amount of paper wasted, which ultimately helps any organization to reduce their carbon footprint.
A major company in the still expanding fax space is Commetrex, a fax provider whose target market is enterprises as well as ITSPs that are recommended to leverage three products including: the BladeWare Fax Media Server (used in IMS-like service networks to implement UC applications), BladeWare Fax-to-Email and BladeWare Email-to-Fax (both of which are used to implement cloud-based hosted fax).
When asked why in his opinion he believes that fax is continuously turned to rather than other communication channels in the corporate environment, Mike Coffee, CEO of Commetrex (News - Alert) told me, “I'm afraid it's quite simple: fax is ubiquitous, making it perfect for mass written and graphical communications. Specifically, to use it all you need is the recipients fax number; you don't need to assume any infrastructure other than fax, and that's a safe bet.”
Since its initial deployment, fax has evolved greatly, and now powers advanced capabilities that were once not even thought of. In fact within the space, the biggest push has been the transition from hardware-based PSTN fax to an all-software FoIP infrastructure.
“This lowers cost and opens new application possibilities due to the location-independence of IP-based infrastructure,” Coffee added.
The company’s Smart ATA offering encompasses Smart FoIP, a technology that solves three big problems faced by FoIP users. It rids the system from experiencing any obstacles prompted by late-arriving T.38 re-Invites from the receiving gateway, which can then lead to a call to fail. The product also drives a session remaining in G.711 fax pass-through mode while simultaneously reducing PCM-clock synchronization problems, as well as fully supports T.38 V3 with V.34.
Fax isn’t what it once was – a bulky machine that just wasted space and collected dust and industry experts are in unison in regards to predictions that it will remain for the long term.
Coffee concluded, “Although there is a constant procession of new ways to communicate written and graphical information where each one serves a purpose, there have been no contenders to fax's ubiquity. “
Edited by Allison Boccamazzo