Faxing Issues

[devnull]

Hi all. I know this is yet another faxing post, but I wasn't able to find another one with quite the same setup I have.

I have a PIAF 1.7.5.5 running asterisk 1.4.36. Two T1's coming in through a Sangoma A104d. The system also has digium 8 port wildcard.

Basically, what I am trying to attempt to do is run several hardware fax machines off of the wildcard. I am configuring the wildcard with FXS ports that are directly connected to the fax machines. The issues I have been getting are that things work 'some of the time'. Some faxes come through, or only come through partially, or sometimes the fax is never received at all.

Basically, I am looking to see if I am completely barking up the wrong tree here, and if I am, what route I should be taking. My boss is strongly urging me to come up with a solution that does not use POTS lines as he is sick of paying the bill for them every month.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

 

[gregc]

A few thoughts on this. I went with a Sangoma analog card along with the T1 card and used their fax sync cable.

This didn't work that great for us as our PRI provider was a VOIP company therefore, while our setup was solid, there was still the inherent errors that happen across the internet. If the PRI was with the local phone company, I'm sure our success rate would have been much higher.

Now, for inbound, we use Vitelity's Fax service. It works fantastic. I've setup a gmail account that receives the fax and we have a little program that fetches from that mail account every 2 minutes and prints it on the fax machine. The only issue we run into is when someone is on the phone with the sender and them saying "it just went through" and our guy saying "it isn't here." So there is a 3-4 minute delay, but for the most part, that is acceptable to us.

For out going, we use a simple Linksys 2102 and have a few VOIP providers setup. I have routing setup to send out faxes on the routes that work best given the number dialed (that is, sometimes one number will work great on voip.ms but another will only work on Vitelity).

-Greg