Jump to content

ATA Provisioning.


Anthony Goss

Recommended Posts

We use Grandstream ATAs. They've been ROCK solid for us. The only thing we've noticed is that some of them seem to stop sending caller ID information through to the analog phone once and a while, and you have to reboot the ATA to fix the problem. Not sure whether that's a 2600hz problem or Grandstream.

I would love auto provisioner though, as the Grandstreams require a lot of tweaking to the settings to get them to register and work well. We saved screenshots of all of the config pages so that we can go back and reference it, but auto provisioner would make our lives much easier.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 6 months later...
It's an HT702.  I bought it for testing.

http://www.grandstream.com/products/gateways-and-atas/analog-telephone-adaptors/product/handytone-70...

I suspect some of the configurations will be similar.  I have had trouble getting ATA's to work properly with T38 before.  It would be helpful to see if there are settings that I may have missed.

Is there a community wiki somewhere?  It would be great for documenting best practices.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

FYI I highly recommend against faxing on the 2600hz platform. It was horrible many times when we tried, regardless of whether or not we used T38. Most faxes failed.

Not to plug another company, but Vitelity's Fax ATAs (called FaxEnable) are amazing and have almost a 100% success rate. We've deployed about 20 of them so far and our customers love them. It's the best of both worlds because you have a device that you can use for your customer to plug their fax machine into, but they still can use fax to email and also they have a web interface where they can log in and see previously sent and received faxes. So it's like an ATA plus eFaxing combined into one product. The way it works is the device, rather than act as an actual ATA, receives the fax onto it locally. It then sends the fax over https to Vitelity and they send the actual fax from their servers. Incoming faxes work in the same manner, just vice versa (Vitelity receives the fax on their servers, then sends it to the device at the customer's site as some form of https transmission, and then the local device sends the fax to the fax machine). This prevents the entire issue of trying to send a live fax over an Internet line with jitter/packet loss/etc. It's a TDM-based technology which is much more reliable.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Honestly, we are already setup with Vitelity and for some reason we moved away from it, I can't remember why at this point, but we do have an account with them and did test it out.

For what it's worth, I recently did quite a bit of testing using 2600's fax2email and email2fax and so far we have had 100% success rate.  I was quite impressed.  We sent faxes to US and Canada with 0 failures.  I don't plan on using ATA's if I can avoid it, but I do want to be ready to try it in those special cases.

The testing I did previously with this ATA and an Obihai was with my previous carrier VoIP Innovations.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

To confirm are you referring to the fax API? (fax2email and email2fax)

It usually works well for us too, I just meant it's too much of a pain to have some customers on one faxing platform and other customers on another faxing platform, so we migrated almost everyone who needs outbound faxing to Vitelity. Inbound faxing has always worked fine other than for a period of maybe a month or two when they had some glitches, so if a customer only needs inbound faxing then we just set them up on 2600hz.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2600Hz Employees
well, i say exactly the opposite. faxing with 2600hz has been reliable for both inbound and outbound. i use SPA112 and Obihai , fax2email , email2fax and also use it integrated in "windows fax e scan".
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Administrators
The problem is that results vary, but everyone wants 100% perfect. The best option is a device that does "fax over HTTP" which is what you all are describing with this Vitelity solution. They don't actually make that device - it's available for resale to resellers. It's likely the one provided by http://www.faxata.com/ if I had to guess. Then they brand it & resell it and/or tie it into their portal.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2600Hz Employees
i made the comment as an individual user while using faxing in several environments.
ATA's may be hard to configure and i'm sure Darren was talking about provisioning it.
i'm not against your move to vitelity but it seems obsessive to me to exclude 2600hz while it perfectly does the job, and your post without a reply would otherwise be seen as an answer to a problem which other may think it exists. maybe you got a bad experience and you're pleased with vitelity which is ok,  but i just want others to know that it's ok to use ata's with 2600hz for faxing.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Administrators
Hmmmm you're sort-of paraphrasing things I've said here. So for the record, I mentioned that it's dependent on the quality of the circuit, the distance the fax ATA is from our datacenters, the places you try to fax TO and the types of machines involved.

What works for one person doesn't always work for another.

Thus, the path of least resistance to ensure quality is NOT to use the ATAs if you are not willing to gamble. The issue I have with this approach is, at some point, the cost of everyone's labor to try and get a fax ATA + fax machine working is way higher then just going the non-ATA route (whether that be an API, email or an HTTPS Fax device).

I never meant to imply it can't work or that there's a hard rule here. I was trying to state that when it doesn't work, it's near impossible to diagnose and fix in a reasonable amount of time/effort. Thus, you can use it if it works for you, or go the safe route and use something else.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2600Hz Employees
but will vitelity allow you to fax by extension to/from fax machine/emailtofax ? or fax between accounts within the platform without maximizing revenue ? or drop your client faxes in their favourite storage provider (google drive, dropbox, ... ) ? or reuse one number for both fax and voice ?
Link to comment
Share on other sites

whether that be an API, email or an HTTPS Fax device
Darren, are you saying that there's an HTTPS fax device that's compatible with 2600hz? We use Vitelity almost exclusively as well because of the AudioCodes HTTPS fax device. If 2600hz has a similar device, I'm switching tomorrow. :)
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Administrators
No, I'm saying that if you're using a Fax over HTTPS solution, it probably wasn't invented by Vitelity. You guys keep mentioning them. In reality, you could probably just contact AudioCodes you could buy the same device/service, or use other providers who offer the same box. It's not a Vitelity service, and it's not a Fax ATA. It's a Store-and-Forward solution, too, which is kind of cheating. It's basically an HTTPS version of the T.37 standard (store-and-forward).

Frankly if it's still this critical and in demand, perhaps 2600hz should sign up for the AudioCodes solution and implement it. I'll think about that...
Link to comment
Share on other sites

No, I'm saying that if you're using a Fax over HTTPS solution, it probably wasn't invented by Vitelity.
You are right there. Seems to be an AudioCodes innovation.
In reality, you could probably just contact AudioCodes you could buy the same device/service
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that you need to run AudioCodes software in your cluster. So those of us on the hosted platform at least can't...
which is kind of cheating.
Yes, yes it is cheating and I love it for that. :)
Frankly if it's still this critical and in demand, perhaps 2600hz should sign up for the AudioCodes solution and implement it.
+1 for that!
Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...