On 10/04/2012 09:27 AM, Carlos Alvarez wrote:
However I'd just suggest that you look at the business case for screwing around with fax at all. As a society, if we had decided to stop supporting this dead technology years ago, with all the time and money we've collectively wasted we could have completely eliminated world hunger.
I recognize that you're being a bit facetious in this latter comment, but the argument that you're making here is unfounded. I believe that if you were to look at the Davidson Consulting reports about the fax industry for as long as those reports have been available you'd find this. The technology is not dead and has enough momentum to propel it forward for many years to come. Maybe this is understood in your acknowledgement of "society" supporting it, but the reason why it's supported is because the technology is sound and fills a very valuable purpose in business and other activities.
There is no adequate replacement for fax. E-mail doesn't do it, and most other reliable document communication mechanisms are locked-up in proprietary patents and interests that will invariably prevent them from becoming standardized at all.
I'm not a big T.38 fan-boy, although I do applaud the ITU for that attempt to get fax working on IP networks. Unfortunately, it's fundamentally flawed because it needlessly perpetuates the tether between fax and telephony. In an IP network there is no reason whatsoever for fax to be saddled on top of a telephony layer. Fax is data communication, and IP networks are quite effective at data communication. I can envision a future fax system which truly uses modern IP network designs such as DNS, encryption, security, and rides on a very effective communication protocol and yet continues to operate on the fundamental communication protocol defined in ITU T.30 which makes well-implemented faxing so dependable.
I can't count the hundreds of hours I've wasted on fax support just to prop up this stupid and unnecessary technology.
Many others have felt exactly the same way, and I don't mean to be rude, but invariably the reason why they feel this way is because they repeatedly tried to do it the wrong way.
We just made the decision this week to outsource it all and never deal with it on our network again. I am slowly re-gaining my sanity because of that decision.
And until the new technology comes along that is and will be *precisely* the right decision for most of the people who move to a virtual environment or who completely detach themselves directly from the PSTN.
Now I'm going to take a fax machine out to the parking lot and shoot it, even talking about this awful waste of time makes my blood boil.
Well, if you were using stand-alone fax machines then that was part of your problem.
Thanks, Lee. -- _____________________________________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- New to Asterisk? Join us for a live introductory webinar every Thurs: http://www.asterisk.org/hello asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
