Juli (& Sillen) --
The CyberFax offering does operate as a gateway (GW) to the Internet. So, essentially any old fax machine can dial up the "source" CyberFax GW nearest them (perhaps a local number). The source GW would then establish a "virtual connection" over the Internet to a "destination" GW near (ideally nearest) the destination fax machine. After this virtual connection is established, the fax data flows from the source fax machine through the source GW over the Internet to the destination GW and finally to the destination fax machine. All this happens in "real-time" and is transparent to both the source and destination fax machines and the users at both ends. The benefit of course, as Bruce says, is the savings in the GW to GW communication cost by using the "free" services of the Internet. If, say the communication is from New York City to Singapore or Johannesburg and say 10 or 20 pages are being sent, it's obvious the savings would be substantial (!).
Although Internet faxing can be done in lots of ways, the CyberFax advantage is doing it in real-time versus "store-and-forward". In the latter case, the fax data is dumped (say from your PC) onto the Internet and gets stored and forwarded (duh), perhaps via several network nodes, and arrives "sometime" (perhaps hours) later at the destination. In the real-time instance, the data is received "immediately" and the destination is able to transmit back a receipt to the source machine showing the number of pages received, etc. just as you would expect in a "normal" fax transaction.
The revenue source to DCI and/or the service providing the GW is still in a per page (or per minute) charge to the end customer -- just at a greatly reduced rate (say .05 vs .35 or more per minute -- numbers totally off the top of my head).
I've never been able to get to the bottom of the hardware involved. I explicitly asked and was explicitly told it was NOT a PC (with the CyberFax GW hardware simply being a card(s) in PC card slot(s)). I also don't know what operating system (OS) they run but I know it's not NT and suspect it's not UNIX. Rather, I suspect it involves one or more imbedded microprocessors (I got the feeling Motorola 68000s once for some reason) running some embedded real-time OS.
Hope that helps because I don't know much more ...
Dan |
