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Technology Stocks : Voice-on-the-net (VON), VoIP, Internet (IP) Telephony -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (1176)	8/25/1998 10:07:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 3178

T.38: The Emerging Standard for Real-Time Fax Over IP The Internet is giving entrepreneurs visions of building a cost-efficient global fax delivery network free from long-distance or international tariffs. The T.38 standard gives them real potential. Steven Shaw telecoms-mag.com August 1998 A revolution is underway in the relatively calm world of facsimile transmission, or fax traffic, and it promises to bring significant benefits for users, significant because even in an age of e-mail, fax remains firmly entrenched in corporations worldwide. Unfortunately, this also means that fax traffic accounts for a pretty big chunk of a company's long-distance phone bill. A recent Pitney Bowes study estimated that the average Fortune 500 company spends about $37 million a year on phone charges, almost 40 percent of which can be attributed to fax calls. Moreover, there is little or no strategy for controlling these spiraling costs because most corporations allow fax machines to be purchased at the workgroup level. Fax remains popular because it is a proven, reliable document delivery mechanism. It's ideal for communicating across time zones since fax machines typically are available 24 hours a day. Because it provides a written, tangible document, fax is often used to cross cultural and language barriers where spoken words might easily be misinterpreted. At any one time, approximately 40 percent of calls between the United States and Europe are fax calls, and the figure is closer to 50 percent for calls between the United States and Asia. A key to the success of the fax machine is its unquestionable ease of use. As industry analyst Maury Kauffman of the Kauffman Group notes: "You can teach any 5-year-old who knows a phone number to send a fax. Try teaching a 5-year-old to log on to a computer to send e-mail." But what makes the fax so successful can also limit the innovation necessary for its long-term success. Of the estimated 70 million fax machines in the market today, a meager 30 percent are capable of 14.4 kbps, and less than 1 percent of the installed base communicate at the newer 28.8-kbps transmission speed. With so many machines already deployed around the world, it takes years for new fax technologies to reach critical mass. But now the Internet is giving entrepreneurs visions of building a different world--one with a global fax delivery network free from long-distance or international tariffs that could save users millions of dollars. One tool crucial to this new fax world is the T.38 standard recently approved by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). As companies combine the high cost of faxing with the understanding that fax is a universal messaging technology, many have started to offer IP-based fax services. Recent announcements of worldwide Internet fax products by AT&T, GTE, and UUNet suggest that a solution to the high cost of faxing is at hand. Many of the Internet fax services available today bridge the user's computer terminal with a fax gateway somewhere in the world. This is an extension of traditional LAN fax technology, where a fax gateway at the customer premise allows documents created on client PCs or workstations to be faxed through a common gateway. Often these gateways are integrated with e-mail servers, allowing users to combine e-mail and fax messages to different users. The drawback to this and most other IP fax services is that they ignore two fundamentals of fax technology. First, a LAN fax service treats a fax as it does an e-mail, forwarding the message from one server to the next until it reaches the remote site. Secondly, this approach presumes most corporate fax traffic is generated at the client PC level when in reality much of the fax traffic still starts at the good old-fashioned fax machine. A lot of people still like printing documents from their computers and walking over to the fax machine to send them. It's simple human nature. Fax machines offer the user the psychological satisfaction of watching the paper go into the machine and visualizing it printing on the remote side. This powerful user perception should never be underestimated when designing a fax service or solution. The fax machine is still king of the immediate document distribution world. Therefore, to provide a seamless Internet fax solution it is essential to address both client PCs and fax machines in the enterprise. A true solution must allow fax traffic to be "selected" from the customer premise and routed over a data or IP network without interfering with the user's preferred interface. It becomes apparent that the principles behind an effective Internet fax solution are nearly identical to those behind an IP telephony solution. The ability to route calls out of the customer premise switch equipment allows both fax and voice traffic to be managed through a single gateway. T.38 is the first worldwide standard proposed for mapping the T.30 fax protocol onto an IP network. T.38 uses two protocols, one for UDP packets and the other for TCP, and ASN.1 encoding of data to ensure a standard technique. However, one of T.38's key benefits is its ties to the H.323 protocol (see Figure 1). Anyone involved with IP-based voice is familiar with H.323, the approved standard for video and audio call setup over IP networks. H.323 has become the recognized standard for initiating an IP-based phone call. Endorsed by Microsoft, Intel, and Netscape, H.323 has become the protocol of choice. H.323 provides a format for selecting a coder, or algorithm, to encode the voice data stream. The T.38 protocol has already been earmarked for inclusion into the H.323 protocol as the preferred fax coder of choice. This will prove to be a key factor in the successful adoption and deployment of the T.38 standard. As the world deploys IP voice gateways to augment the existing public-switched telephone network/time division multiplexing (PSTN/TDM) infrastructure, fax traffic will be handled the same way as voice traffic. Companies have already begun developing T.38-based products knowing that gateways and telecom equipment that can seamlessly support PSTN to IP voice/fax will be in high demand as the world begins to invest in data communications networks to handle telephony as well as LAN traffic. Steven Shaw is marketing director for the fax business unit (formerly GammaLink) of Dialogic Corp. He plays an active role in the Electronic Messaging Association's fax committee and also in the Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum's fax working group. Shaw can be reached at steven.shaw@sv.dialogic.com. Respond with comments to this article at editorial@telecoms-mag.com. [TOP]