Sending fax issues in the last 48 hours

[Logicwrath]

I have been seeing 50%-65% of the faxes to one of our GFI Faxmaker Online phone numbers fail with the following error code:

"Received no response to DCS or TCF"

I opened a free efax account and did not have issues sending faxes to that number.

I contacted technical support on the receiving side first and they went through troubleshooting. They suggested that we are the only one reporting failing faxes with that error code at the moment and that we should contact our sending carrier to have you try and setup a different route/carrier to test this out.

We are supposed to be onboarding a new client and with our test faxes failing consistently we are having to delay this.

We also had a report from a different client today that they received a successful message on a fax but it did not actually go through. I can't trust the person who told me this completely. I checked their call logs and saw that the message failed twice before it was successful on the third try. The first couple attempts showed: No response after sending a page

I think there is a problem with your carrier or route for faxing. Please advise.

[Darren Schreiber]

You can't compare our service to eFax. eFax is a TDM-based service, and ours is a VoIP based service. We can't guarantee 100% completion because we use VoIP carriers (which keeps the costs low and avoids patent issues) but the downside is that there can be completion issues, sometimes chronic.

The way we usually deal with these is, as we receive reports, we check the Caller ID and the dialed number and identify which carrier is being utilized. We then switch to an alternate carrier for that route. But you should expect to get reports like this over time until the common areas a particular client is faxing are "tuned". Unfortunately we haven't found a better way to do this other than investing in our own TDM bank, which we wanted to do last year but we ran out of room in our datacenter. Luckily (see other post I made) we are moving to new datacenters next month, so hopefully we can revisit this issue.

What was the area code and prefix of the Caller ID on the FROM number, and the same for the DIALED/TO number? I can see if we can try taking whomever the call completed on out of rotation and see if that improves reliability.

[Logicwrath]

The main issue with the DCS TCF is as follows:

FROM: (586) 248
TO: (586) 863

The (586) 863 number is our personal 3rd party fax account.  We have not onboarded the customer yet, however, this client already has a 3rd party account using the same provider so I was worried if we set them up right now with this number failing if they tried testing on their number with the same provider they might see issues.

The other issue I mentioned where a client received a successfully sent message but the fax was never received is as follows.  They fax to this carrier daily and it is very important to them.  I saw 2 failures to this number no response after page error before we saw a success.  Afterwards we were told that they receiving party never got the fax.

FROM: (586) 465
TO: (866) 214

I understand your points, I am also very excited to hear about the possibility of 2600 acquiring a TDM bank.  Any assistance you can provide for this is appreciated.  If in general we can report issues and tweak routes to specific numbers that get faxed often that is certainly helpful.

I can also provide call id's or any other details if you need/want.  Just let me know.  Thanks!

[Logicwrath]

I wanted to also say that I opened the free efax account to test sending faxes from 2600 to efax, not from efax to the 586 863 number we were having trouble with.  I was trying to see if this fax box was having issues sending to multiple carriers.

[Darren Schreiber]

Hmmmm  you seem heavily dependent on faxes in general, what is your use case in general here? Are these insurance companies or something? Doctors offices? Who is doing all this faxing?

I ask because I wonder if you want to actually just test a TDM test install I have. I don't know what threshold of pain your client is willing to put up with but when you say things like "they fax this number daily" I worry that the issue will recur and they'll have a bad experience.

There is another post on here about fax ATA devices, perhaps that is a better route for this particular client?

[Logicwrath]

The clients are:

Auto Dealerships (faxing credit applications and to documents to the state)
Medical Offices
Insurance Agents

Regarding the ATA comment, I tried making that work with VoIP Innovations in the past and had trouble.  I am not aware of all the special settings and options that would be required to make an ATA working as best as possible.  I will look for that post, or if someone wants to link it that would be great.

Additionally, email to fax, fax to email is preferred as it is easier (in my opinion) and I assumed that the connection from the datacenter to the receiving side would be better than the connection from the client office to the receiving side.

If you are looking for a reseller to test some TDM equipment you guys are working on that is very interesting to me.  I assume a TDM based solution would be superior and we are certainly working very hard to have a good faxing solution.  As much as we love to hate faxing, we can't get rid of it.  I would prefer not to have to work with yet another vendor just for faxing.  I am not sure what you mean by pain, as in would testing the TDM cause pain or continuing to use VoIP based faxing cause pain.  We are interested in testing this out.  We could either have the TDM based solution available just to us so when a client complains we can test the same fax over the TDM solution or I would even consider setting up clients on the solution if you think it would be at least as reliable as the VoIP based faxing they are using now.  We would also be willing to test and provide feedback on the service.  We could see how the solution affects resolution, quality, reliability etc..

Regarding faxing and fax quality, just this morning we think we might have found an issue where poor bar codes on sent faxes might be causing delays in the processing on the receiving side.

[Karl Stallknecht]

FYI we use Vitelity for our clients who are heavily dependent on faxing. They have a TDM network which has been flawless for us. Any day that 2600hz has a reliable TDM network though we'll happily switch all faxing services back to them :-)

Yes we don't like using two providers, but it's better to do this and have reliable faxing for clients who will complain if it isn't perfect.

[Darren Schreiber]

Hi Logicwrath,
     I finally got some time today to try to get my test TDM line up. I just wanted you to know that this is progressing, albeit slowly.