As counterintuitive as it seems, migrating your company’s fax infrastructure to Internet Protocol (IP) is not a simple upgrade. This is true whether your network is based on the latest Voice-over-IP ( VoIP) technology or even (how’s this for counterintuitive?) fax-over-IP, or FoIP.
One advantage of IP is compression. You can combine data, voice and video, broken into packets, over an IP network in compressed form — to save bandwidth and, usually, maintain acceptable quality. With a VoIP phone call, dropping packets is annoying, but the connection survives. Worst case: You need to ask, “Could you repeat that last thing you said?”
Fax, however, cannot be compressed, and it actually takes more bandwidth to send a fax over IP than a regular phone call. Worse, even a small amount of packet loss along the way can cause the entire fax to fail. The longer the fax, the less likely it is to go through. And that’s only one of many problems fax has with IP.
That is why many VoIP service providers actually recommend placing critical fax applications on plain old telephone lines (an extra expense), since faxing is known to be problematic on IP networks.
Fortunately, there is a better way. eFax Corporate offers a cloud solution specifically designed to send and receive faxes efficiently and securely regardless of the underlying network technology.