IAFax offers customers with a premise-based fax server telephony connections in the cloud via HTTPS. This allows business customers the best of both worlds; maintaining control of their existing fax application while connecting it up to a 100% fax-focused network for reliability.
IAFax supports connections to NET SatisFAXtion fax servers from FaxBack Inc. Connections can scale from two channels up to large scale enterprise or provider deployments requiring multiple T1’s and redundant connections.
Why use HTTPS based fax connections for fax machines and MFP’s?
- Reliability when used with over the Internet connections
- Security over the open Internet as it uses SSL encryption
- Ease of connections since it uses HTTP
- No firewall issues that can be typical with SIP T.38
- Supports all data connections including WiFi, Satellite, and Cellular
- Preserves real-time faxing from fax server
- Maintains VoIP cost effectiveness
HTTPS vs. SIP T.38
Here is a more technical view on the differences between using HTTPS for faxing vs. SIP T.38.
- Latency on the Internet can affect critical timing in T.38. HTTPS faxing buffers the connections allowing the fax call to not be affected during typical Internet latency.
- One of the key factors affecting SIP T.38 is burst packet loss. When this happens, it more often than not causes the fax call to terminate. Using HTTPS and its underlying TCP connections that were built to be immune to burst packet loss gives businesses much better reliability in the open Internet.
- SIP T.38 has no inherent security and thus requires additional and often costly security layers between the end business and the provider. With HTTPS, the business does not need to do anything to achieve full security.
- Often, SIP T.38 connections use redundant packets increasing bandwidth consumption. HTTPS does not need this redundancy to achieve a quality connection. For larger-scale enterprise connections, limiting bandwidth can be something to be aware of.
IAFax is not a store-and-forward, but a full real-time fax communication similar to SIP T.38. HTTPS is used between the business fax server and the IAFax cloud.
Don’t be locked into only one carrier that you use for your telephones and voice traffic. We have multiple carriers and do everything we can to help ensure your fax goes through.
IAFax intelligently routes fax retries over alternative carrier paths to ensure “best effort” methods are used to deliver customer faxes. By doing so, IAFax is allowing customers the highest quality faxing not typically achievable over a dedicated VoIP route.
As part of our cloud-based high availability and geo-redundancy strategy, we use Microsoft Azure to help ensure our service is always online.
