PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Fax is dead, right? Well, not exactly. While organizations are finding that PDFs and scanners can replace the ubiquitous fax machine, regulatory requirements continue to make it imperative that businesses keep their hands on a fax for signing and executing documents.
Pulling analog wires to connect fax machines can be expensive. Using the IP network makes more sense, but faxing over IP has been difficult at best and it's becoming even more challenging now that organizations are deploying SIP trunks.
The shift toward cloud-based service and SIP-trunking widely discussed here at ITEXPO Sept. 1 to 3 is also creating havoc for a mainstay of business communications. Fax machines, those dinosaurs of the communications arena that have found new importance under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, may no longer work effectively over today's IP network.
Subtle differences in encoding touch-tones, delay, T.38 implementations and other problems have long complicated fax compatibility when connecting over IP backbones. For the most part enterprises have resolved those problems over the years by controlling the underlying network between the originating fax machine and the endpoint, a gateway.
As companies increasing rely on cloud-based telephony services, they are reducing hardware costs by relying on SIP trunks to connect to the service provider's network and eliminating gateways. Gateways move into the cloud where the service provider terminates the call onto the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). While this architectural shift makes economic sense, it requires that the IP backbones of the access and long-haul providers must be T.38-compatible if the fax machines on the two endpoints are to interoperate.
The problem is particularly acute because faxing continues to be viewed under Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA as a means for executing documents, notes Marc Robins, SIP Forum president and managing director. As such, fax machines will likely be with IT for many more years.
The SIP Forum announced at ITEXPO the first step toward addressing the problem. The FOIP (Fax-over-IP) Interoperability Task Group published its formal FOIP Problem Statement outlining the scope of the investigation regarding creating a set of standards and recommendations for fixing the fax interoperability issue.
Some of the issues the SIP Forum's FOIP effort will deal with include: interoperability failures and reliability or quality issues seen in the field or lab, architectural principles, and proposals for achieving a higher degree of FOIP interoperability and reliability. The group will explore other issues as well, such as secure IP fax, and ways of better enabling use of a single number for fax and voice. A definitive date for recommendations to be completed has not yet been set.
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