On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, Ira Abramov wrote:
However I was specifically interested in Fax over VoIP, meaning I can hook up to the internet with a PC and no land line and send a fax through a VoIP session. whether it's my hosted server at an ISP where I don't want to install a phone line, or a laptop connected at a hotspot in a restaurant during lunch. a DOCSIS line is still tied to a specific "modem" at the end of your cable company's line at your home or office...
You can fax over Voip and there is even a module for Asterisk for this. What you cannot do is fax reliably from a home DSL connection to a Voip PSTN termination. If the network load is high the connection will glitch and the remote fax will drop it after a number of retries. That's why you use a store-and-forward host in between (i.e. an Asterisk PBX running on a host with good bandwidth or directly at the PSTN origination hardware - aka FXO card present in Asterisk lingo). FYI G711 signalling is indistinguishable from PSTN from the end points, excepting in latency (it is even better than telco G711 because telcos use compression and bit stealing for signalling so the connection is not 64kBps clean as the Voip connection is - that's why intercontinental Voip connections often sound cleaner than even Nezeq local calls). Of course you will never fax over iLBC or GSM, only G711 will work.
Usually it is best to buy services from a fax specialized company (like eFax). That allows you to do a lot of things for very little money (usually). Sometimes all you need is an IP as you can send G3 fax files directly to the server, and there are toolkits for bulk faxing and such.
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