Fax: Sangoma FAXstation
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@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
I see no mention of POTS:
It's at the beginning of the video. Analogue and POTS are the same term in telephony.
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@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
I agree that no POTS lines are needed, but there is also no FoIP going on here.
None externally, it looks like. But all the Fax portions appear to be on analogue/POTS. It goes to something else in between, no FoIP.
It's not a bad idea, but their attempts to hide what it does and be weird about it are pretty obvious.
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@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
I agree that no POTS lines are needed, but there is also no FoIP going on here.
None externally, it looks like. But all the Fax portions appear to be on analogue/POTS. It goes to something else in between, no FoIP.
It's not a bad idea, but their attempts to hide what it does and be weird about it are pretty obvious.
Right - That's why I LOL'ed in my first post that this is NOT a FoIP solution. hehe
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Okay, looking through the data sheet over and over, and going through the video, I'm pretty confident that this is a solution that exists to do two things:
- Replace faxing completely while...
- Making the end users keep using legacy fax equipment.
This could make sense in a place where you need to trick management or just really want to keep using the fax machines as scanners. But behind the scenes, it's leaving fax behind and going to, for all intents and purposes, email. But then has an "email" to fax gateway in their datacenter in case you are sending to someone else that is using fax.
But in the middle, there is no fax.
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Bottom line, people want to keep & use their "old school" fax machines, be able to walk up to the damn machine & just send a fax.
How it gets there....as long as it gets there...faxing has never been fast!No one wants to pay the $40+/mo for a POTS line.
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@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
I agree that no POTS lines are needed, but there is also no FoIP going on here.
None externally, it looks like. But all the Fax portions appear to be on analogue/POTS. It goes to something else in between, no FoIP.
It's not a bad idea, but their attempts to hide what it does and be weird about it are pretty obvious.
Right - That's why I LOL'ed in my first post that this is NOT a FoIP solution. hehe
Right, FoIP never happens in the example. But wanting to call it that makes them act really weirdly about what it is doing. It's like doing VoIP, but actually making a CD at one side, running to another person and playing the CD for them.
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@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Bottom line, people want to keep & use their "old school" fax machines, be able to walk up to the damn machine & just send a fax.
This is where it differs from FoIP and why we are so confused. Normally, when people talk FoIP, it's partially to not have to maintain old legacy fax equipment, ink, analogue / POTS lines, etc.
So that's why we were so confused - because some of the big things we want to fix with FoIP don't get addressed at all. If you didn't have old fax machines, this solution would make you invest in them.
If you already own old machines and don't want to remove them, I could see why this would be interesting. If you are looking at FoIP generically, it seems crazy.
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@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
How it gets there....as long as it gets there...faxing has never been fast!
Sort of, but it does start instantly. This would behave a bit differently. The call setup would happen after the fact, rather than before hand. Just different behaviour.
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@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Bottom line, people want to keep & use their "old school" fax machines, be able to walk up to the damn machine & just send a fax.
How it gets there....as long as it gets there...faxing has never been fast!No one wants to pay the $40+/mo for a POTS line.
I sure in the hell do, when I look at a faxing solution like this that costs me $700+ a month compared to a single or even two lines at $40/m.
Granted, my costs really are more than just $40/line, it's the faxing equipment (but I already have that) and it's a server to store the faxes on. But I can buy that for the savings I have in a single month of paying for a service.
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I'm in the opposite boat. Since I don't have legacy fax machines sitting around, and I actually want FoIP (in the rare case I need to deal with fax) then I would not want to have to buy special legacy fax equipment, put in analogue lines, and buy special hardware to convert that to email or something like email. I just want to send the fax directly or, even better, send the email directly and have it convert to fax on the other end. One is FoIP, and I could do without that. But the other is Fax to Email, a much more modern solution.
This solution hinges on a lot of assumptions, assumptions that aren't stated well anywhere in their literature, apply to not all that many companies, and don't mirror the terminology that they use. The terminology that they use doesn't match their solution, making it that much more difficult to understand their intended use case.
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How it gets there....as long as it gets there...faxing has never been fast!
It literally takes twice as long. One one or two pages, this is not such a huge deal.. but for larger documents, this can be a huge problem.
My machines take roughly 1 min to send a fax page. Assuming I have a 60 page document to send (happens more often than you might realize, especially in medical). So now it's 60 mins to send to the local fax accepting machine, which then sends a digital copy to the vendors DC, which then faxes it to my recipient, again taking roughly another 60 mins. It's now taken 2 hours to send a fax that normally only took 1 hour.
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Now - everything that Scott and I have said not withstanding, this sale pitch is for non technical owners/managers who want a fax solution - but for some reason don't want analog lines. Perhaps they send/receive so few faxes that their costs will be less than paying a normal monthly POTS line bill. And if that's the case, this solution might work for them.
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@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
How it gets there....as long as it gets there...faxing has never been fast!
It literally takes twice as long. One one or two pages, this is not such a huge deal.. but for larger documents, this can be a huge problem.
Right because the process is actually (from what we can tell...)
FAX | Analogue Line | Fax to Email Gateway | SMTP over Internet | Email to Fax Gateway | FAX to RecipientIt is stuck sending a fax, then sending an email, then sending a second fax. So there are two full fax calls that have to run through the entire process, plus the trivial email or email-like Internet transfer in the middle. If you had a really busy or slow Internet line, this could be triple or quadruple the time for a normal fax to send.
I assume that they cache some of this so that you can't tell how long it takes. And who really cares about speed here? But there are a lot of steps. And one I wonder about is, how do you know that it was received, since it gets "received" more than once along the way and presumably you will have moved on before you know if it worked, since the fax machine you are using has no idea of how to get confirmation from the destination.
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@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Bottom line, people want to keep & use their "old school" fax machines, be able to walk up to the damn machine & just send a fax.
How it gets there....as long as it gets there...faxing has never been fast!No one wants to pay the $40+/mo for a POTS line.
I sure in the hell do, when I look at a faxing solution like this that costs me $700+ a month compared to a single or even two lines at $40/m.
Granted, my costs really are more than just $40/line, it's the faxing equipment (but I already have that) and it's a server to store the faxes on. But I can buy that for the savings I have in a single month of paying for a service.
How did you come up with $700/mo.?
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@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
I'm in the opposite boat. Since I don't have legacy fax machines sitting around, and I actually want FoIP
What's a great FoIP service you can recommend?
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@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Now - everything that Scott and I have said not withstanding, this sale pitch is for non technical owners/managers who want a fax solution - but for some reason don't want analog lines. Perhaps they send/receive so few faxes that their costs will be less than paying a normal monthly POTS line bill. And if that's the case, this solution might work for them.
Except there is a little problem there... what if you had a contract that required fax and said email could not be used. Would this violate that contract since it is neither fax or FoIP? That's worth considering. Now we know I hate fax, as a manager I'd not care. But as a contractual or legal obligation, or an audit control, this might be a really big deal. Calling this fax isn't correct. Fax is used within the process, but the process is not a fax.
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@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Bottom line, people want to keep & use their "old school" fax machines, be able to walk up to the damn machine & just send a fax.
How it gets there....as long as it gets there...faxing has never been fast!No one wants to pay the $40+/mo for a POTS line.
I sure in the hell do, when I look at a faxing solution like this that costs me $700+ a month compared to a single or even two lines at $40/m.
Granted, my costs really are more than just $40/line, it's the faxing equipment (but I already have that) and it's a server to store the faxes on. But I can buy that for the savings I have in a single month of paying for a service.
How did you come up with $700/mo.?
That price is from a few different vendors I approached years ago when I was looking into fax replacement solutions.
I receive roughly 700 pages per day, and we send around 100. At that volume, I was quoted $700/month.
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@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Bottom line, people want to keep & use their "old school" fax machines, be able to walk up to the damn machine & just send a fax.
How it gets there....as long as it gets there...faxing has never been fast!No one wants to pay the $40+/mo for a POTS line.
I sure in the hell do, when I look at a faxing solution like this that costs me $700+ a month compared to a single or even two lines at $40/m.
Granted, my costs really are more than just $40/line, it's the faxing equipment (but I already have that) and it's a server to store the faxes on. But I can buy that for the savings I have in a single month of paying for a service.
How did you come up with $700/mo.?
That price is from a few different vendors I approached years ago when I was looking into fax replacement solutions.
I receive roughly 700 pages per day, and we send around 100. At that volume, I was quoted $700/month.
This service is $24.95 for 3000 pages (+ $190 if you want the gateway)
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@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Now - everything that Scott and I have said not withstanding, this sale pitch is for non technical owners/managers who want a fax solution - but for some reason don't want analog lines. Perhaps they send/receive so few faxes that their costs will be less than paying a normal monthly POTS line bill. And if that's the case, this solution might work for them.
Except there is a little problem there... what if you had a contract that required fax and said email could not be used. Would this violate that contract since it is neither fax or FoIP? That's worth considering. Now we know I hate fax, as a manager I'd not care. But as a contractual or legal obligation, or an audit control, this might be a really big deal. Calling this fax isn't correct. Fax is used within the process, but the process is not a fax.
I hear ya... they talk about medical using this.. but I didn't read far enough to see them claim HIPAA compliance either.
They do specifically say it's transmitted to the other side via SSL, but I suppose it could be a keyless SSL, i.e. no actual encryption.. lol -
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
I'm in the opposite boat. Since I don't have legacy fax machines sitting around, and I actually want FoIP
What's a great FoIP service you can recommend?
There are none. FoIP is a bad thing conceptually. FoIP is analogue (paper) to digital (scan) to analogue (phone) to digital (IP) to analogue (phone) to digital (descan) to analogue (paper) - obviously problematic to go from A2D2A so many times in one transmission. This is why eliminating fax is so important. It's a completely flawed technology.
Because of this, FoIP cannot be reliable. By definition, it can't be. The only way to do it is to get flawless A2D2A transitions which are impossible to do. Not that straight analogue fax was all that reliable, it's not.
So it is starting from a position of an unreliable technology over an unreliable process. You can't have a good way to do that.
But, for true FoIP, your best results are a good SIP trunk with T.38 protocol. Today, this tends to be nearly as reliable as traditional Fax as is the closest thing to Fax that you can do in the digital world. This process is, however, just the same as normal phone calls and requires no special cost or management.
You can treat FoIP exactly like VoIP, and VoIP systems can't tell it isn't just more VoIP. Because Faxing is literally disguising image data as voice.
