Faxing How-to and Troubleshooting
Faxing and VoIP - Tricks of the Trade
Faxing has been around for years and most of the protocols were written in an age when faxes traveled over a "traditional" voice network. In today’s world, the majority of telephone calls are, at some point, converted between a VoIP and traditional voice service and back again. Every portion of the ACD network is setup with full Quality of Service. This ensures that the voice and data on the ACD part of the network is reliable. While we strive to create the most efficient Internet and Voice network, we can't control what happens when it leaves our network and hops on the rest of the Public Network. In the Internet world, voice is first converted to packets and then they are sent over the connections that make up the Internet. These packets may take a different route from each other thus they may arrive at slightly different times. In doing so, some packets may be discarded, but the end result is that the receiving VoIP device has enough information to make the call clear and indiscernible from a normal call. To ensure the best fax quality, taking some of the below steps will help improve faxing. These same troubleshooting and configuration principals apply to alarm system lines, elevator emergency lines, credit card machines, and anything else that uses a Plain Old Telephone Service line for data. At ACD.net we use the latest VoIP fax codecs (codecs is a computer term that means to encode) to make our end as robust as possible. That being said, following are some items you can do on your end to help make faxing run smoothly: • Set the baud rate on the fax machine to a slightly lower speed. Generally 9600 is great. It’s different on different fax machines but you can look for the baud rate or a setting that specifies V.29 or V.17. In general fax machines set for V.34, may have echo cancellation and it is unlikely to work, as the slight delay in VoIP will make training between fax machines difficult. • Remove or turn off any Error Correction Mode or “ECM”. • Try enabling Overseas Mode. • Change the resolution from fine to standard; this will also speed up the rate at which fax machines transfer data. It's not just our end of the network that matters. Two fax machines with the same fast setup running on VoIP can often train with each other so that they can begin transmission but because of the inherent problems with today’s networks and VoIP, the transmission gets interrupted. If you set your machine up to work properly within a VoIP world, it will by default, train the other machine to use the same settings. This will greatly increase a smooth Fax Transmission.
If you can't figure out how to change your fax machines settings you can either contact the manufacturer or usually you can put the model number into Google for the manual.
