POTS line replacement
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@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:
@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@Pete-S said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
@Pete-S said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
We also have a call into our Security/Fire Alarm company on the costs of a replacement alarm system is and if it can work over cellular. We will then see which will have the best ROI depending on years of service.
It's highly unlikely that you need to replace the alarm system, as most commercial security systems can be expanded with different modules. Moving from POTS to IP or cellular is very common.
It's also very possible that your alarm system will not work over your AT&T ATA (POTS emulation). Some alarm systems don't use the same signaling as a modem or fax would.
I found the manual online and this is the section describing the transmitter itself.
"Digital Alarm Communicator/Transmitter
Two modular phone jacks allow easy connection to telephone lines. Modular jacks are labeled PH1 for Primary Phone Line and PH2 for
Secondary Phone Line. Two telephone line active red LEDs are provided as well as a green Kissoff LED. The integral digital communicator provides the following functions:
• Line Seizure: takes control of the phone lines disconnecting any premises phones
• Off/On Hook: performs on and off-hook status to the phone lines
• Listen for dial tone: 440 Hz tone typical in most networks
• Dialing the Central Station(s) number: default is Touch-Tone
, programmable to rotary
• For tone burst or touchtone type formats: discern proper Ack and Kissoff tone(s). The frequency and time duration of the tone(s)
varies with the transmission format. The control panel will adjust accordingly.
• Communicate in the following formats:
Ademco Contact ID
SIA-DCS-8
SIA-DCS-20"With regards to signaling, this is the only thing that stuck out to me.
It has for sure more capability than your typical ATA. For instance I've never seen line seizure, off/on hook and rotary dialing. It's likely that they use a specific codec optimized for tones and not talk as well.
Yeah, never seen line seizure either.
Odd, I've definitely seen/heard of this before.
I believe the line seizure in the Fire Alarm is to knock off any device currently using the line to send alert signal in case of a fire.
Oh it makes sense in a legacy world of physical lines. Just... haven't seen that used. Dedicated lines were more common I thought.
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@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@Pete-S said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
@Pete-S said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
We also have a call into our Security/Fire Alarm company on the costs of a replacement alarm system is and if it can work over cellular. We will then see which will have the best ROI depending on years of service.
It's highly unlikely that you need to replace the alarm system, as most commercial security systems can be expanded with different modules. Moving from POTS to IP or cellular is very common.
It's also very possible that your alarm system will not work over your AT&T ATA (POTS emulation). Some alarm systems don't use the same signaling as a modem or fax would.
I found the manual online and this is the section describing the transmitter itself.
"Digital Alarm Communicator/Transmitter
Two modular phone jacks allow easy connection to telephone lines. Modular jacks are labeled PH1 for Primary Phone Line and PH2 for
Secondary Phone Line. Two telephone line active red LEDs are provided as well as a green Kissoff LED. The integral digital communicator provides the following functions:
• Line Seizure: takes control of the phone lines disconnecting any premises phones
• Off/On Hook: performs on and off-hook status to the phone lines
• Listen for dial tone: 440 Hz tone typical in most networks
• Dialing the Central Station(s) number: default is Touch-Tone, programmable to rotary
• For tone burst or touchtone type formats: discern proper Ack and Kissoff tone(s). The frequency and time duration of the tone(s)
varies with the transmission format. The control panel will adjust accordingly.
• Communicate in the following formats:
Ademco Contact ID
SIA-DCS-8
SIA-DCS-20"With regards to signaling, this is the only thing that stuck out to me.
It has for sure more capability than your typical ATA. For instance I've never seen line seizure, off/on hook and rotary dialing. It's likely that they use a specific codec optimized for tones and not talk as well.
Yeah, never seen line seizure either. Of course, there are no lines to seize so the issue should be moot.
Also @Pete-S
My apologies for not specifying. This is from the fire alarm manual not the ATA.
Oh I understand. Just saying it wouldn't be an issue to lose the feature as that feature is a "fix" for the legacy line approach.
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@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
@JaredBusch said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
We also kept one other POTS line for our main fax line also (not my call).
So sorry. Look into http://faxback.com
This is the service that Skyetel uses under the hood for their HTTPS based ATA fax device. If you already have Skyetel service, then just use it there.We do have one fax line through our VOIP service but is does have it's issues. I noticed others here have talked about their fax service so I am going to check that out this week.
A "line" or a service? Faxing should really always be a service, never a line. Don't try to terminate something doing fax to legacy equipment, that will always be a problem. If you have a fax service, you'll never have issues. If you try to avoid that and shoehorn modern fax into legacy gear, it'll always be flaky, expensive, and a pain in the ass.
We have one fax line from our VOIP company that uses one port on an ATA (don't know the correct terminology here) and then two other POTS line for another fax. Those all go into modems connecting to our Hylafax server. This has been good but when its acts up, your right, it is a PITA.
The service I am looking into are online fax services using something like Faxback, SkyeFax, SR Fax or something similar.
I looked at the total faxes pages for the last 45 days and we have roughly 9000 pages of faxes.
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
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@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
Sadly that is entirely to much effort for them to invest. If their IT can make it happen, the device could send to an email address of their own- then run a process that then emails any attachments to that address to you via encrypted email.
another option - one my EMR is investigating - IF their MFP support scan to secure FTP - you could setup a secure FTP site, provide credentials to your customers (different for each) and your customers could update the MFP to save to the secure FTP site. This leaves the amount of work for the end users to be exactly the same - choose your company from the phonebook, drop the pages on the ADF, press go - done. Should be the same as faxing.
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@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
We have one fax line from our VOIP company that uses one port on an ATA (don't know the correct terminology here) and then two other POTS line for another fax. Those all go into modems connecting to our Hylafax server. This has been good but when its acts up, your right, it is a PITA.
Yeah, that CAN work, but that's what we try to avoid. That's replicating a POTS line in house. That transition process causes problems.
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@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I looked at the total faxes pages for the last 45 days and we have roughly 9000 pages of faxes.
wow
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@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
When you say "encrypted", do you mean normal email (which is encrypted.) Or what people call "encrypted email" which isn't email at all and is often a huge pain.
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@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I looked at the total faxes pages for the last 45 days and we have roughly 9000 pages of faxes.
I just can't recall how many pages a month we do when I last looked, but I do recall the monthly charge from a 'fax service' was going to be around $900/month. I didn't even bother bringing that to management - there was less than 1% chance of that happening.
Bringing in faxes to our own physical machines, then saving to a network share was costing around $30/month per line (we have three). We might be able to save money moving to using full on VOIP from VOIP.ms or Skyetel, but that project has been to high on the tree. I say full on VOIP because Cox (our local dial tone provider) is all VOIP behind the equipment they drop on our doorstep, from there it's analog. We have had the typical VOIP related issues - Cox's network had a HUGE amount of line noise on coax causing packet loss which caused faxes to fail like crazy - after 6 months they finally found some bad taps at neighbors up the street and fixed the cable issue, which fixed our fax failure issue.
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@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
When you say "encrypted", do you mean normal email (which is encrypted.) Or what people call "encrypted email" which isn't email at all and is often a huge pain.
This is oversimplifying things. While the number is small, and getting smaller - some email providers still do not support SSL/TLS SMTP connections. Of course - the OP could setup their own rule saying, if someone tries to sent them email that isn't on SSL/TLS, don't accept, he'd likely need management approval for that.
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@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:
@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
When you say "encrypted", do you mean normal email (which is encrypted.) Or what people call "encrypted email" which isn't email at all and is often a huge pain.
This is oversimplifying things. While the number is small, and getting smaller - some email providers still do not support SSL/TLS SMTP connections. Of course - the OP could setup their own rule saying, if someone tries to sent them email that isn't on SSL/TLS, don't accept, he'd likely need management approval for that.
It's not. In the same way someone using "encrypted mail" could unencrypt it and distribute things on their end. In both cases, once you hand off, the issue is theirs not yours. That's all encryption ever means. You never control it once they've take responsibility for it.
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@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:
@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
When you say "encrypted", do you mean normal email (which is encrypted.) Or what people call "encrypted email" which isn't email at all and is often a huge pain.
This is oversimplifying things. While the number is small, and getting smaller - some email providers still do not support SSL/TLS SMTP connections. Of course - the OP could setup their own rule saying, if someone tries to sent them email that isn't on SSL/TLS, don't accept, he'd likely need management approval for that.
It's not. In the same way someone using "encrypted mail" could unencrypt it and distribute things on their end. In both cases, once you hand off, the issue is theirs not yours. That's all encryption ever means. You never control it once they've take responsibility for it.
You're missing the whole encrypted part - not even talking about the sharing shit part.
if you don't have SSL/TLS encryption on transmission, then you don't have HIPAA compliance - so to say all email is encrypted is wrong. - sure 99%+ is because most SMTP now allow for opportunistic TLS, but not all do.
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@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:
@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:
@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
When you say "encrypted", do you mean normal email (which is encrypted.) Or what people call "encrypted email" which isn't email at all and is often a huge pain.
This is oversimplifying things. While the number is small, and getting smaller - some email providers still do not support SSL/TLS SMTP connections. Of course - the OP could setup their own rule saying, if someone tries to sent them email that isn't on SSL/TLS, don't accept, he'd likely need management approval for that.
It's not. In the same way someone using "encrypted mail" could unencrypt it and distribute things on their end. In both cases, once you hand off, the issue is theirs not yours. That's all encryption ever means. You never control it once they've take responsibility for it.
You're missing the whole encrypted part - not even talking about the sharing shit part.
if you don't have SSL/TLS encryption on transmission, then you don't have HIPAA compliance - so to say all email is encrypted is wrong. - sure 99%+ is because most SMTP now allow for opportunistic TLS, but not all do.
Sure, but it's a pointless argument. Set your email correctly and voila, as you know. You should not have your email set up incorrectly. It's that simple.
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@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:
@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:
@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
When you say "encrypted", do you mean normal email (which is encrypted.) Or what people call "encrypted email" which isn't email at all and is often a huge pain.
This is oversimplifying things. While the number is small, and getting smaller - some email providers still do not support SSL/TLS SMTP connections. Of course - the OP could setup their own rule saying, if someone tries to sent them email that isn't on SSL/TLS, don't accept, he'd likely need management approval for that.
It's not. In the same way someone using "encrypted mail" could unencrypt it and distribute things on their end. In both cases, once you hand off, the issue is theirs not yours. That's all encryption ever means. You never control it once they've take responsibility for it.
You're missing the whole encrypted part - not even talking about the sharing shit part.
if you don't have SSL/TLS encryption on transmission, then you don't have HIPAA compliance - so to say all email is encrypted is wrong. - sure 99%+ is because most SMTP now allow for opportunistic TLS, but not all do.
Sure, but it's a pointless argument. Set your email correctly and voila, as you know. You should not have your email set up incorrectly. It's that simple.
uh - what? You don't get to control the other side, only your own side - and I'm guessing that you don't reject all non SSL/TLS connected transmissions, which would be the only thing you could control.
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@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
Sadly that is entirely to much effort for them to invest. If their IT can make it happen, the device could send to an email address of their own- then run a process that then emails any attachments to that address to you via encrypted email.
another option - one my EMR is investigating - IF their MFP support scan to secure FTP - you could setup a secure FTP site, provide credentials to your customers (different for each) and your customers could update the MFP to save to the secure FTP site. This leaves the amount of work for the end users to be exactly the same - choose your company from the phonebook, drop the pages on the ADF, press go - done. Should be the same as faxing.
Ohhhh. This is something to look into. I have a client that just may want to test this out.
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@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I looked at the total faxes pages for the last 45 days and we have roughly 9000 pages of faxes.
wow
I know. Tell me about it. Trying to work with the LOB app developer to figure out how the heck we can cut that down.
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@scottalanmiller said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I have been pushing my clients with MFP's scan/print to PDF and send via encrypted email. Just cannot seem to convince the remaining clients to change.
When you say "encrypted", do you mean normal email (which is encrypted.) Or what people call "encrypted email" which isn't email at all and is often a huge pain.
The latter. We use Barracuda for email scanning and with the service we can use their web portal to upload/download any attachments.
EDIT: Expanding on this after reading the discussion between Dash and Scott.
When we send out "encrypted" email with some form of the word "Encrypt" in the subject line, our internal email uses SSL/TLS to Barracuda and then Barracuda stores the email. Our user logs into Barracuda website to retrieve the download if needed.
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@Dashrender said in POTS line replacement:
@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
I looked at the total faxes pages for the last 45 days and we have roughly 9000 pages of faxes.
I just can't recall how many pages a month we do when I last looked, but I do recall the monthly charge from a 'fax service' was going to be around $900/month. I didn't even bother bringing that to management - there was less than 1% chance of that happening.
Bringing in faxes to our own physical machines, then saving to a network share was costing around $30/month per line (we have three). We might be able to save money moving to using full on VOIP from VOIP.ms or Skyetel, but that project has been to high on the tree. I say full on VOIP because Cox (our local dial tone provider) is all VOIP behind the equipment they drop on our doorstep, from there it's analog. We have had the typical VOIP related issues - Cox's network had a HUGE amount of line noise on coax causing packet loss which caused faxes to fail like crazy - after 6 months they finally found some bad taps at neighbors up the street and fixed the cable issue, which fixed our fax failure issue.
Well that is interesting. Some fax service I looked at were capped at around 3000 pages for $100 then per page goes nuts after that. Still looking though.
Using our Hylafax server with a Samba Share has worked well for a while especially when we were getting even more faxes but the lines only costed us $24 per line which included calling anywhere in the 48 States.
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@pmoncho said in POTS line replacement:
Using our Hylafax server with a Samba Share has worked well for a while especially when we were getting even more faxes but the lines only costed us $24 per line which included calling anywhere in the 48 States.
Exactly - no service comes even close in cost for the amount of faxes that you and I are looking at - I want to say I was north of 7000 pages a month when I was last looking.
I have a few small clients who receive their faxes through their FreePBX. FreePBX then emails it to their O365 tenant, where a powerautomation script runs, pulls out the attachment and puts it into a sharepoint site.
The users all have that folder in sharepoint pinned in their OneDrive for Business - in the end, the users just see files showing up in a 'network share' - which they can easily upload into their EMR.
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Of course that doesn't solve the sending issue. People just don't want to deal with scanning a document, then uploading to a service, then sending from that service, etc...
They want to walk to the machine choose from the address book and hit send.
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We are lucky - our EMR includes faxing service (in and out). While we still have a not insignificant amount of physical paper to send out, the EMR handing that is generally pretty nice - expect when there are problems, then they blame it 100% on the sending/receiving side, it's never a problem on my EMR's side. /sigh.
