As internet technology emerges rapidly and many organizations continue to build out and expand their new IP infrastructure, VoIP is moving into wider adoption with fax over IP (FoIP) ramping up quickly.
Both technologies bring traditional telephony applications into data network environments, allowing organizations to transport phone conversation or fax data calls over them. This consolidation of data and communications resources provides an opportunity to leverage a single unified common broadband resource and employ the Internet and company Intranets for cost-effective voice, fax and data transmissions.
The following benefits are the most significant when implementing or considering a FoIP solution:
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings due to network consolidation
- Ability to push a consistent fax solution throughout the entire network including remote locations
- Improved IT management
- Device/application integration
Who will benefit first from adopting FoIP?
Mainly organizations whose planning to transition to an all IP-based collaboration environment as they will benefits much on ROI (return on the investment) of consolidating voice, fax and data communication.
Quoting Pete Davidson from Davidson Consulting, the market for FoIP systems started to show up in force in 2005…this led to a market that grew by 180% to $31 million!
“The voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) market is a booming field. According to a recent report by TeleGeography, the industry's second-quarter revenue jumped 173% over the prior year to $607 million.” — Investor’s Business Daily, Oct. 3, 2006
“Enterprise VoIP adoption in North America will more than double in 2010. VoIP adoption will triple by 2010 among small organizations in North America.” —Infonetic’s Research “User Plans for VoIP”, May 2006.
Technical Overview
Compressing fax signals is different from compressing voice signals, so a new standard (T.38) has been created for this. If the VoIP adapter and gateway are T.38 compliant, most fax machines can simply be plugged into the VoIP adapter instead of a regular phone line.
T.38 is an ITU recommendation for sending fax messages over IP networks in real time. The T.38 fax relay standard was devised in 1998 as a way to permit faxes to be transported across IP networks between existing Group 3 (G3) fax terminals. T.4 and related fax standards were published by the ITU in 1980, before the rise of the internet. In the late 90s, VoIP, or Voice over IP, began to gain ground as an alternative to the conventional Public Switched Telephone Network. However, because most VoIP systems are optimized (through their use of bandwidth-saving compression) for voice rather than data calls, conventional fax machines worked poorly or not at all on them. Thus, some way of transmitting fax over IP was needed.
See also: List of free Internet Fax Service providers
