Outbound Fax with Physical Fax Machine Via ATA through a VOIP Gateway
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This one is an interesting one. Here's the architecture:
Elastix is running as a VM on ESXi with a Vega 100 G VOIP gateway connected to the PRI for inbound and outbound calls. Inbound and outbound calls work beautifully. We have a Grandstream HT701 connected to a physical fax machine and registered as a SIP device on the Elastix box. The HT701 is set to fax passthrough mode. That is the only setting that has been changed other than registering an extension. The fax machine is an older Sharp fax machine that has a max baud rate of 33.6K and is supposed to be auto-adjusting for lower speeds.
The primary use for this fax machine is for outbound faxes. When we try to fax outbound, the number gets dialed, you hear the fax tone on the other side like it connects just fine, but when trying to send you get a busy message which causes the fax to bomb. I feel like it is baud speed related but cannot validate that claim. There is no way to decrease the baud rate on the fax machine that we could fine. However, what makes this odd is that when we set an inbound route in Elastix to the extension for the fax, an inbound fax worked without a hitch. I am guessing maybe when the fax came in the speed was fine since it came over TDM first.
My thought was to maybe try putting the ATA in T.38 mode and enabling that on the Sangoma as well, which will bring the baud rate down to 14.4 Kbps and may succeed in sending faxes.
Has anyone else ever run into this? I have talked to folks in similar scenarios and remember them having to lower the baud rate to get faxing to work. Any help is much appreciated.
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I've found faxing over SIP to be iffy at best. Depending on your network load, condition of your gateway and fax machine...it's just not a perfect science. If i'm not mistaken Elastix has a built in fax module...I have no elastix experience which I intend to change this month. Here's a link
http://elastix.wikia.com/wiki/FAX_Setup_@_Elastix -
I have used Elastix with great success using T.38 and a SIP provider. That is how I have it at another site. Our SIP provider uses T.38, and we us the virtual fax capabilities in Elastix for receiving faxes via e-mail and even sending via the GUI. At this particular location I have a physical fax machine (HP Officejet x476) attached to the same model ATA mentioned here. It is setup as a SIP extension in Elastix and in fax passthrough mode. It works for sending and receiving faxes without any issues. But it is not traversing through a VOIP gateway either.
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@NetworkNerd so how did this end up going? There was not a lot of activity on this thread back when you first posted it.
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scott why are you dredging up 2 year old elastix threads? let em die
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@hubtechagain said:
scott why are you dredging up 2 year old elastix threads? let em die
- his job is to drive traffic
- see 1
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Knowing the outcome is also good for history posts on this site as a repository of information.
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yeah it is great to know the end result of a problem or a project,
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This was something @FiyaFly and I worked on together, and I believe he was the one who fully resolved it by changing the baud rate settings on the physical fax machine. But I can say for a fact that this setup worked and is still working today at the site in question.
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@NetworkNerd said:
This was something @FiyaFly and I worked on together, and I believe he was the one who fully resolved it by changing the baud rate settings on the physical fax machine. But I can say for a fact that this setup worked and is still working today at the site in question.
good job
