Fax and ATAs

[Guest DanH]

Throwback from a prior week! The team had a discussion on the finer points of getting faxing and KAZOO to play nicely together, and it was informative! We'll break this down into the usual main points, but as a preamble, it's appropriate to address the elephant in the room: faxing and VOIP don't usually mix so well in general. This is a known issue, as evidenced by a cursory review of search engine results for "faxing with VOIP", for instance. While our engineers are indeed wizards of their respective crafts, there is no going around some of the challenges of faxing over VOIP connections sadly. What follows is a bit of guidance and best practices as gathered and assessed by the support team on one of their weekly TWIL discussions.

As always, please jump in and comment on this with your experiences and any other tips or feedback you may have! 

­­­­Fax and ATA 

When using a Fax Machine with an ATA, it must be set up in a specific way.  If this is not done, you will likely experience issues such as being able to send faxes, but not able to receive them.

1. When creating the device in Kazoo, do not set it up as a fax; the ATA is what is directly connected to the network.  Here you have two options:
   • Check first to see if this device is listed as a SIP Phone option.  We do have specific ATA models available here and setting it up this way will give you some config options within Kazoo rather than having to use the device’s Web UI.
   • If the device is not listed there, set it up as an ATA in Kazoo.
2. Once you’ve properly added the ATA to Kazoo, then you will want to check your options for specifying T38.
   • This is usually done via the fax’s Web UI, but there are so many variables with the makes/models of devices out there that it may need to be set differently, so you may need to spend some time finding these settings for your specific device.  Ultimately though, you will want T38 specified.
3. Test.
   • Test to make sure everything is working as expected.  If it is not, there may be additional settings required on the device(s) and this may require some troubleshooting and experimentation.

With that you should have a functional ATA setup to handle your faxing, which is what we would recommend and prescribe if available. 

[Skunkbeard]

@DanH Can you share the fax adapter you are using? We have been using the Cisco ATA's and they work great but no real remote provisioning without some work and they have gotten pricey. 

[Guest DanH]

21 hours ago, Skunkbeard said:

@DanH Can you share the fax adapter you are using? We have been using the Cisco ATA's and they work great but no real remote provisioning without some work and they have gotten pricey. 

@Skunkbeard I wish I could help here but this is actually only information I am passing through from the support team in this case! I've not directly dealt with a Fax adapter or ATA myself to date actually, but we've worked with the engineering team to get some of the understandings we have in support, as well as from field reports from customers and other testing we've done. Unfortunately I would need to appeal the greater community at large about such recommendations! 

[Skunkbeard]

@DanH Hey no worries! Appreciate you taking the time to respond.