Many companies today are migrating their telecommunications infrastructure over to Voice over IP (VoIP), benefitting from the opportunities presented by unified messaging services. However, certain challenges such as fax communications have surfaced, especially when it comes to sending larger volumes of faxes: transmission via VoIP has significant disadvantages.
A great number of companies worldwide are currently consolidating their telephone systems and collaboration solutions. This process is being accelerated by numerous telecommunications providers such as SingTel, Korea Telecom and China Mobile moving over to IP-based data transmission. While VoIP offers businesses numerous advantages such as reducing costs, using services regardless of location, and administrating VoIP-based unified messaging solutions centrally and conveniently, new challenges arise, especially when it comes to fax transmissions.
Limited bandwidth and loss of data packets
The greatest benefit for senders and recipients are speedy and reliable transmissions. The available bandwidth plays a crucial role in the transmission of data via IP-based networks. It must be large enough to transport all concurrent data streams successfully from sender to recipient. Within a network, the effective bandwidth fluctuates constantly. Should there be insufficient bandwidth, due to unforeseen peaks for example, it can result in packet loss. For voice message transmission over VoIP telephony, this barely makes a difference since a speech packet only contains about 20 to 30 milliseconds of spoken data which corresponds to just about one syllable. On the other hand, the human brain can compensate up to 5 percent of this information loss. Using User Datagram Protocol (UDP), VoIP telephone calls can be broadcasted without any hindrances. While there is no guarantee that all the transmitted packets actually arrive at the recipient when using this unprotected transmission way, the sender and recipient benefit from speedy transmission and only slight fluctuations.
Disruption and disconnection
In contrast to voice transmissions, faxing over VoIP depends on the secure transmission of data packets as fax machines react sensitively to the loss of packets. Lacking data packets could result in missing page sections, automatically leading to the entire page being requested again from the sender. The loss of just one percent of packets already has the effect of reducing the success rate for the transmission of a fax page to 80 percent. Statistically, this means a fax transmission of more than 20 pages has only one percent chance of being delivered successfully. When dealing with large fax volumes sent via VoIP, this can result in a huge loss of information and disconnections, causing substantial disruption to business critical communication.
T.38 protocol is frequently overestimated
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) states that T.38 Protocol, also known as Fax over IP (FoIP), could be one remedy to overcome the communication problems. This protocol was specifically developed to ensure delay-free transmission of fax documents over the internet, and is considered robust. When using T.38, faxes are no longer sent as digital speech messages, but rather in an independent protocol which has its own packet format and rule set. However, many of the large telephone service providers still do not support the use of the T.38 protocol for VoIP-based telephone connections, making the protocol a solution hardly ever practicable.
Reliable fax communication from the cloud
To deal with these challenges, businesses can consider virtual fax connections in the data centers of external service providers. In this case, fax transmission no longer takes place through the VoIP infrastructure of the telephone service provider, but through email, FTP or a web service directly via the infrastructure of the cloud service provider. Some benefits include the following:
1. Greater optimization and convenience
Service providers can dimension their connections to the telephone companies in such a way as to guarantee that the full bandwidth is always available. This ensures that even during peak loads no bottlenecks occur, preventing the resulting loss of data packets. Cloud fax services also offer the utmost failure safety and transaction security at all times. The services can be employed independently of the VoIP provider or as a component in a unified communications solution, without needing to go through much time and effort integrating it into an existing telecommunications solution. Users can access the services regardless of location, through existing multifunctional office machines, or even directly from business applications since the services can be connected using all common protocols. This precludes the need for a company to operate its own fax infrastructure, enabling them to save on the costly maintenance, updates and licenses that come with running an on-premise system.
2. Higher throughput with lesser error rates
With the changing technology landscape, innovative service providers now offer features which reduce error rates in fax transmissions even further. When two fax messages are simultaneously sent to the same fax number, the line is usually found busy and transmission automatically repeats. In practice however, this phenomenon results in many messages failing to be delivered, despite the automated resend function. For this reason, some service providers offer specific solutions that enable fax messages addressed to the same number to be automatically sent one after another. This lowers the error rate in the fax transmission by up to ten percent, ensuring that messages are delivered reliably.
3. Highly secure data processing
When exchanging sensitive information, such as health records or other personal details, it is crucial that the processing of data takes place in accordance with the applicable country regulations. When selecting a fax service provider, companies should, therefore, pay particular attention to where and according to which legal guidelines their data is processed. Should data be entrusted to a cloud whereby the exact location of the server is unknown, it can often lead to critical issues. Companies should therefore only trust in a service provider that gives its customers binding assurance through a Service Level Agreement (SLA), that their data is processed securely and with maximum privacy. Companies should also look for service providers that undertake the archiving of all their fax correspondence in a way that complies with legal and other guidelines. This helps customers implement requirements and directives clearly, making fax communications highly reliable and secure.
4. Maximum transparency and control
Companies using high quality cloud fax services benefit from the unlimited control over their fax communication through an administration platform that offers detailed information regarding all service instances. In contrast to on-premise systems, cloud fax services are scalable with effort and costs, always being based on the current demand for the service. For companies switching to VoIP, managed cloud services not only offer maximum flexibility and reduce the complexity of the whole fax communication process, but also fulfill future requirements.
Oliver Prevrhal is the Managing Director of Retarus Asia