Despite the popularity of e-mail and the Internet, fax continues to be an important technology for business communications. According to fax industry analysts Davidson Consulting an estimated 112 million fax machines are transmitting more than 100 billion fax pages of invoices, purchase orders, legal documents, financial summaries, confidential and mission-critical business documents around the globe on a yearly basis. By today’s standards it is not unreasonable to consider fax a dated technology. It was invented in 1843, over 160 years ago! It was not until the Group 3 standard was published in 1980 by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), that fax gained a reputation as a popular, universally compatible, inexpensive and reliable technology for business to business communication. VoIP is the standard for voice communications in most organisations today. But in the rapid transition to VoIP fax is often overlooked or ignored as many organisations presume fax will work just as effectively on IP Networks. But getting fax to work reliably has become one of the biggest challenges facing organisations as they switch from the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to Voice over IP (VoIP). Fax over an IP Network (FoIP) presents a special problem because the fax protocols rely on very precise timing mechanisms. Circuit switched networks for which Group 3 fax was designed don’t have jitter and the modulation techniques and protocols specified in the G3 standard contain no provision for dealing with it. Read more...