Using a Regular Fax Machine

Ffa plays no part in a bridged sip call

Fax For Asterisk is a commercial facsimile (Fax) termination and origination solution. What you want from asterisk is just to bridge the call. Asterisk has no problem bridging fax calls. Make sure that the codec you use for that sip channel is G.711 though.

So if I setup an extension and then program an ATA to it (running G.711) and hook that to a fax machine, I should be able to send and receive faxes no problem??

Do I need the T.38 addon??

Are there any special configurations that need to be made in PBX Manager??

it depends on a lot of mitigating factors.. the quality of the network connection, the reliability of the fax machine to only do 9600 baud etc. Brother machines seem to suck the most over ip.

the t.38 module is not for physical machines, its to send/receive faxes from files on the asterisk server. Those modules are software fax machines.

Thanks for all the info guys!

always very helpful!

I've written a custom app that allows a user to specify a destination for an inbound fax after it gets saved as a file first. The destination can be either an email address, an extension (sip or iax2) or a fax machine. It took some work but it works pretty well.
FSD

you wrote your own T.37 module? That's pretty cool. How much of the original header data (station id etc) are you saving?

No, that's not what I did. What I did was develop a full-featured fax server as an add-on package. Amongst other things, the user can specify a destination for an inbound fax. I always appreciate feedback on my work, both positive and negative. I try to let feedback drive the direction of my work. You can check it out at http://demo.voipbiz.org and log in as user 200 with passwd 200. Let me know what you think.
Thanks
Frank

I like how you kept the same appearance

Frank,

Do all those options work?

Things that are interesting to me:
Custom music on ring - is that the ring back sent to the caller?
Vacation settings
Voicemail settings, especially the dB gain for emailed voicemails
The recap 'home' screen
FMFM separate from cal forward
Export CDR's to Excel

Really looks good, great work!

-Matt

Matt;
Thanks for the feedback. You're talking about the user portal work. It's pretty cool, huh? Yep, all the functions work. Since the Thirdlane software is so configurable, I just went crazy and added anything that came into my head, plus any feature requests that users had. The caller hears the custom music on ring. I didn't make the ringtone features available in the demo because it tends to be phone specific. Its three whole pages of ringtone features. I wrote it all because I wanted to give customers something different than what everyone else is selling. If you have an interest in it, shoot me an email at fsd (@) voipbusiness (dot) us.
FSD

if you guys are sending music in place of ring signals to the caller make sure you do it the right way. On the PSTN this is done with a PROCEEDING message via PRI. In dialplan the code is something like

exten => s,n,Progress
exten => s,n,Playback(yoursoundfile,noanswer)

or however you invoke the sound. The important pieces are the 'noanswer' and the Progress application. This keeps the call disposition from showing up ANSWERED all the time.

Eventually people start complaining of being charged for unanswered calls, they scream and yell at their cellphone company who in turn files a complaint with the FCC and then mr government is calling you :) STE users arent in trouble but ITSP's are likely to get a call from their wholesale carrier about not being SIP compliant.

I have no idea if you guys are already doing this or not, but we got one of those calls 3 yrs ago and wanted to pass the information along.

Eric;
On a similiar note, I worked on multiple projects for a guy last year and one of the projects was a straightforward implementation of a Thirdlane PBX and a lot of customization. Simple enough. He wanted to sell some sort of limited hosted services including 800 service. I tried to focus solely on the engineering and avoid everything else, but I remember asking him if he needed to jump through all the FCC hoops and he said no. He was simply going to open for business and that's that. No rules, no regs, no oversight, no forms to file, no nothing. The Thirdlane software and customizations exceeded his expectations, but his business plan ultimately went nowhere, which is probably a good thing. My question is this. Under what circumstances does a company fall under the of the regulation of the FCC?

CALEA
CPNI
Patriot Act
mandatory payment into the USF

by not filing quarterly/annually with the above FCC departments (all whose legislation has deemed apply to ITSPs) you're looking at enormous fines.

non compliance with CALEA can result in being charged with criminal obstruction if they believe you deliberately violated a wiretap order.