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Faxing over VoIP
By Chris Landry
As
far as VoIP has come in Voice telephone calls, faxing over VoIP
still has a lot of room to improve.
Have you ever tried to fax on your Residential VoIP
line? I have, and it didn't go well. After doing some research on
the subject I found out that the voice traffic and the Fax traffic
are best run over two different codecs. This is why when most VoIP
carriers sell you a business account they include a free additional
fax line with the faxing specific codec to allow for
faxing.
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Faxing on a Voice VoIP line is possible but not
recommended. You can fax a page or two over your Voice VoIP line but
it may take you several attempts to accomplish. The reason is when
the fax tone is digitized into packets, there is packet loss. Packet
loss on a voice is not that critical because even with a little
packet loss, you can still hear and understand what the person is
saying. But, when there is packet loss on a fax, any little bit can
really mess up the fax. The result can be a bad fax, error message,
or even a dropped call. When faxing over a Fax Codec, the loss of
packets is minimized and faxes generally make it to its destination,
but in the case of a large fax (10+ pages) your chances of a
successful fax diminish. It is recommended that a customer who is
planning on faxing quite a bit get a fax machine that also doubles
as a scanner and can convert potential faxes into a .PDF file so if
the fax over VoIP does not work, the customer can email the
fax.
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Programmers are coming up with a better codec all the
time, so it is only a matter of time before VoIP providers
come up with a more reliable faxing VoIP codec. VoIP is here to stay
and the VoIP providers are trying to overcome all of the objections
from small businesses to gain their business, and faxing is a large
issue for small businesses. I have the utmost confidence in VoIP
providers to come up with a solution that is viable by the end of
2008 or earlier.
Faxing is only one of the things to consider before
choosing a VoIP solution. In fact, there are many things to
consider when choosing a VoIP provider. An educated consumer
generally results in a satisfied consumer. You can compare
VoIP providers side-by-side at http://www.voipchoices.com/
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