Significant advances in the infrastructure required for deployment of fax machines and servers have been introduced with the introduction of the T.38 ITU (International Telecommunication Union) standard for Fax over IP (FoIP) in 1998. While two T.38 devices can send faxes to each other, in reality, a T.38 fax call most typically has at least part of the call being carried over the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) as most devices deployed today do not have T.38 interfaces. Instead, they communicate using the T.30 specification, published in the early 1990s by the ITU, describing the handshaking protocol used between Group III/IV facsimile machines to establish and maintain communications. With about 250 million fax machines in use communicating using only T.30, FoIP requires a T.38 enabled gateway that has the ability to convert or encapsulate T.30 data into a T.38 data stream for transmission and also reception. Customers that are capable of moving voice calls across an IP infrastructure using Voice over IP (VoIP) can now route FoIP calls to corporate fax servers no matter where they are located on the network, be they in the same server rack, same data centre or even some geographically different data centre. Fax servers need no longer be physically connected to telephone lines and deployed in every location where a fax call is required to be terminated. A stand-alone gateway which connects both to outside telephone lines or PBX tie lines and the corporate network or an IP enabled PBX/Key system which supports the T.38 protocol will handle the conversion of inbound and outbound T.30 fax calls to T.38 FoIP calls. It is important to understand that the infrastructure required for FoIP is similar to that required for VoIP. T.38 fax traffic is, in fact, more demanding of network quality with regard to issues such as latency, jitter and packet loss than voice traffic is. Quality of Service (QoS) on all network segments carrying the FoIP traffic is an absolute requirement. The T.38 protocol is dependent on the availability of either SIP or H.323 for the setup and transport of packets across the network. The same FACSys® 5.1 product that is operating today can be enabled for FoIP by deploying the FACSys® FoIP software, Dialogic® SR140 software or migrating current generation TR1034 fax boards to IP mode. Installed on the same server, these options encapsulate the T.30 fax traffic that FACSys® is familiar with into T.38 FoIP and allows the server to communicate across the IP LAN or WAN with one or more gateways or FoIP capable PBX/key systems.

Telecommunications line costs can be reduced because separate lines for fax and voice connectivity are no longer required and higher utilization rates can be obtained on existing circuits. In multi-location environments, servers are no longer required in each location where local fax lines must be terminated. The fax messaging environment is architected similarly to common email environments with a highly redundant, load-balanced cluster at the core with the option of geographically dispersed failover clusters. Virtualization of fax servers is now possible because there is no longer a requirement for a physical fax card to be seated in a server. FACSys® fully supports the use of VMWare® for deployment in a FoIP configuration. Costs for deployment, operation and management of virtual servers are significantly reduced from those in a physical environment. Disaster recovery and load balancing capabilities inherent in virtualized environments further enhance the availability of the fax server platform.

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