T.38 Protocol for FOIP

[Tenny321]

It would be great to have ShoreTel switches to support T.38 so we can fax over the VOIP system. (FOIP - Fax Over IP). We are a non profit healthcare org and this would help a lot on our budget and make ShoreTel even more useful than it already is.

[Tenny321]

I guess it will be coming out with ShoreTel 8. Probably like a year and a half but not sure when the release will be.

[Forum]

I guess it will be coming out with ShoreTel 8. Probably like a year and a half but not sure when the release will be.

Shoretel 8 hits Beta late this year, so Controlled release would be like April 2008, and General Release around July 2008. That's if all goes well.

Charles

[Jacker]

Did this ever happen?

[cburgy]

No, this was pushed to a further release in the roadmap. 9.0 or 9.1 perhaps.

[Jlorenz]

No, this was pushed to a further release in the roadmap. 9.0 or 9.1 perhaps.

and another year behind technology

[drvoip]

T.38 is an end to end strategy; unless you are using SIP trunks or working with a carrier that supports T.38, what is the real value here? ShoreTel lets you handle a fax machine as an extension. You can point a DID at it, or make it the site fax and it works just fine. I have found instances in which we interface with a standard PRI; but that PRI is really attached to the carrier with an IAD that talks to a softswitch. Many of these carriers are not supporting T38 in the softswitch they use, so we do get some funny results with fax on these fake fax foux lines! T.38 would be nice, but it would require an end to end transport capaiblity, including a T.38 enabled device. I am thinking there is a lot more pressure for more urgent features.

[JasonC]

Does this mean that still no one has any experiance with T.38 and/or FOIP?

NetsatisFAXion has a FOIP fax server. 10 SIP Trunk fax server with unlimited user's is about $10,000. I think the fax server can be virtualized too.

...but I don't want to be the first to experiment with it no a production level.

[meltsley]

T.38 is 2 different things, there is what Dr VoIP described the end to end T.38 which is what I believe Tenny321 was looking for since it would save you money by not requiring phone lines to do faxes. But this is hardly close to ready across the industry. And then there is T.38 at one end as one leg of a fax call. This is where ShoreTel does have something (finally) available now. They can now do T.38 in ShoreTel 10 to some T.38 compliant fax servers.

This means that it still requires a DID or POTS line coming into the ShoreTel from the PSTN but now from the ShoreTel to the fax server you can do FoIP. Which means you can have geographically diverse fax and voice systems potentially, or a virtualized fax server neither of which you can do if you have to plug an analog extension or a T1 into the server from the PBX.

However I am not sure if ShoreTel 10 will be supporting T.38 from end to end, since it is not a fax server itself I cannot imagine that it would. For that you would need a T.38 fax server on site and then you would need all the people sending you faxes to use a T.38 capable fax machine as well. All in all this seems pretty far off.

[nddarling01]

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Neil Darling
EtherSpeak