Christopher Corn wrote:
May I ask, from your own personal experience. is it not necessaritly worth (the headaches) of investing mytime into setting up SPANDSP into my asterisk system, but rather invest it into going to a company, like packet8 that offers t38 conversion?
I am not really in a position to tell you what something will be worth to you - especially when I've not even used that something myself. I know and use spandsp as a library, with IAXmodem and HylaFAX, but I do not have any experience with spandsp in txfax/rxfax applications or in its new T.38 gatewaying. I suspect that I'll eventually get into spandsp's T.38 aspects, but without that I've only had a limited amount of hands-on exposure to T.38 applications in the form of t38modem and Cisco gateways (which experience was somewhat disenchanting - mostly because of the gateway T.30 processing).
If you have a T.38 fax machine or if you have a T.38-capable ATA connected to a fax machine and you do not have your own PSTN lines then I would suspect that it would be worthwhile to use T.38 pass-through on Asterisk 1.4 or OpenPBX in conjunction with a T.38-supporting FoIP provider. (Because otherwise you don't have any straight-forward, reliable means for faxing from your internal fax machines.)
what does the future of faxing lean towards? before entering an era when all fax machines run the t38 protocol. will we see more t38 termination services or faxing through g711?
T.38 is the end-all solution for faxing over IP networks. So I suspect that you will see the pervasiveness of T.38 implementations increase along with the pervasiveness of VoIP in general. That said, VoIP has its own fair share of problems that keeps it from being capable of replacing PSTN circuits entirely, and so as long as those problems are not generally resolvable for your average business or service provider then you'll continue to also see more of the same, traditional, modem-ing fax machines. So I strongly suspect that you'll see more of T.38, but I don't think that the PSTN (and traditional fax machines with it) is going away any time soon.
from what i've read, using a service that does t38 termination, seems to be where i should go.
I would say that it entirely depends upon whether or not you have PSTN lines yourself. If you do, then I would take whatever efforts you can to avoid the additional points of T.30 processing/relaying (therefore avoiding T.38 gatewaying). But if you do not have PSTN lines, then take whatever efforts you can to properly implement T.38 to your FoIP provider who will gateway for you.
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