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FoIP: Carving its own niche

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA:  Fax over IP entails transmitting fax over the IP network rather than the traditional PSTN lines. The technology hogs less bandwidth compared to analog faxing as FoIP uses packet data rather than the analog data to transmit the facsimile.

Over emphasising the power of email, many industry pundits had predicted the death of Fax over IP (FoIP) as a service even before it had been given a chance to pit against its adversary.

However over the years, not only has FoIP as service resisted the market forces including the threat of email, it is growing strongly and has been able to carve out niche for itself in the niche markets.

Early days, tough days

IP Networks were the pain

FoIP, though wonderful as a technology and service couldn’t live to its initial hype, the fact attributed to lack of robustness of the IP networks in late 90’s and early 2000.

One of the biggest constraints for Fax is the timing constraint. Fax is very timing critical protocol and If the end to end fax is happening and timing are not maintained, the fax will time out and will not be successful.

Says Max Schoerder, vice president, of Faxcore, “For faxes to be successful a very less latency in terms of delay between the end points has to be maintained and a certain quality of service has to be sustained on IP network. So an IP network with a huge bandwidth and very good QoS where people can guarantee pretty good latency is needed”.

“Though in 99, 2000, IP network was in place, it was not that reliable and robust as it is now, so that is what really made the difference and that is the reason that FoIP is starting to pull up much faster in recent year” adds Max Schoerder.

Prasad Kondikona, Technology officer at MultiTech Sytems, says FoIP, as a technology was thrust too early into the market and market factors were not too favourable for the technology to make any impact

“ Though FoIP was a hot topic in 1999, it was too early for FoIP to be widely deployed.   First, there were very few products available but the key issue was VoIP.  Many countries in the world restricted IP traffic including VoIP and FoIP: says Prasad.

 

 

Prasad adds that another factor was FoIP on its own, doesn’t not provide enough significant advantages over legacy fax to present a compelling argument.

“For enterprises to be interested in FoIP, they must also be interested in VoIP and converged communications”, adds Prasad.

Times changed for the better

Strategies focus on the niche segments did the trick

The market dynamics have since changed, with VoIP getting increased traction in enterprises and likes of Cisco and Avaya coming out advanced unified communication products.

Today FoIP is perceived as one of the key components of a converged communications that includes voice and data. This can be attributed to the FoIP service providers targeting the niche markets to gain traction and overcome the threat of email.

With email generally not considered a legal document except is very well defined and very limited areas, and upsurge in malware, spam and phishing activities, enterprise across the world are looking at FoIP to get confidential business done.

Says Max Schoerder, vice president, Fax Core, “ In the U.S., there are privacy laws regarding the distribution of personal information, particularly in Health sector.  Digital faxes that transmit directly from workstations to workstation are more private and secure than those manually sent through a fax machine”.

“Digital faxes can only be viewed by the sender or recipient. Paper-based faxes can be read by anyone walking or standing nearby when the fax transmits. And, unless someone is waiting at the receiving fax machine to instantly retrieve the paper-based fax, and the fax is left on the fax machine or placed on a desk or mailbox where unauthorized people can look at it” adds Schroeder.

Atul Kumar, Assistant General Manager, IT, Syndicate Bank, India, seconds that and says with the upsurge in email attacks, suppliers and vendors are refusing any communication that is email based.

“Purchase order send through email was summarily rejected by a very respected security vendor” says Kumar.

“It was not secure enough was the reason communicated to us and only when the order was send through fax and only then it was accepted” says Atul.

 

As such, FoIP finds acceptance in niche industries like banking, insurance, medical, mortgage and loan, securities trading, law firms, pharmaceutical and many government applications all require a fax communication based on its definition as a legal document. 

Another niche area where FoIP service provider are targeting are companies who have legacy PBX’s and legacy phone system in place and they are not hundred percent sure they want to migrate to all IP environment but keep hearing all this excitement over IP, VoIP and FoIP.

Providing these solutions to them helps to understand the technology and also migrate to IP world and FoIP service providers in turn can get juice of their existing infrastructure.

FoIP Service providers like Faxcore and Multitech point have products that can do FoIP and some how kind of make their existing PBX’s talk to these devices so that the faxes can be send over the internet .

These products have DID support and they can be hooked up to the regular PBX’s. So any body calling on the numbers using DID , the fax will be received to the fax server and then it will be hooked to the PBX’s and using those DID’s extension the fax can be routed to the people onto their desktop, so using this device helps you to connect existing PBX’s and use FoIP solution.

Looking forward

The human tendency to do something in black and white on a piece of paper and that too in real time has always been there.

Coupled with the fact that there are so many traditional legacy fax machines still lying in the office and people do not want to discard them all. It has been ingrained in the way people do business to still have a fax input in front of them.

That is the reason, fax is still permanent and people are still using them even though there are so many products available in the market which allow to do fax from PC or one can send and receive fax as an email.

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