Hosted VoIP PBX Fax Services Solution

Instant Fax Portal

Receiving faxes in Instant Fax Portal mode

We will be happy to configure the Instant Fax service for you on request and thus enable you to send and receive faxes without a conventional fax machine. This solution can also be implemented purely electronically using modern online technologies.

Incoming faxes will thus appear in the Fax Inbox if the Instant Fax Portal service has been activated. These faxes will then be sent to the email address of the PBX user. Faxes received in this way are retained for a long time until they are removed from the portal.

Email alerts for users need to be enabled in order to send faxes to the user's email address.

Within these alerts, you can then select one of the notification types listed below:

To set up these notifications, see the Voicemail tab when editing a user in PBX Management.

Sending Faxes via PBX portal

To send a fax directly from the PBX portal, select the FAX tab. On this tab, you have the Send Fax button on the Fax Inbox page.

There is no restriction for the history of faxes sent. All sent faxes are retained here until the fax portal user manually deletes them.  Sent faxes are also deleted if the PBX fax portal user to whom they were addressed is deleted.

A notification will appear when the fax is received by the fax server.

A DID number that has been configured as an Instant Fax Portal, such as a fax caller ID that is already routed to a portal user, will be offered in a drop-down list for selection when sending an outgoing fax.

Instant Fax Caller ID

The system will automatically use 13214246840 as the caller ID for outgoing faxes if no DID configured by the Instant Fax Portal is currently routed to the portal user.

Only users subscribed to a DID that is configured as an Instant Fax Portal can use the DID as a fax caller ID.

The user's fax number cannot be shown in the caller ID of the recipient's fax machine.

When a user sends a fax via the Instant Fax Portal, the user's fax number is shown in the fax document's header.

The user-selected caller ID number will be included in the fax document's header.

Fax Notifications

When a fax is uploaded to the fax server for delivery, it is placed in an outgoing task queue. The fax server will make up to six tries to deliver the message. The task will be aborted if the fax is not delivered after 6 attempts. Frequent causes of fax non-delivery include busy numbers and individuals answering the destination fax line. The status of the fax will be communicated to users.

Notifications about the status of sent faxes will be placed on the Fax page's Sent Folder (sent fax notifications will NOT be emailed to the PBX User).

Sending faxes as Email to Fax

At a time when everyone likes to and commonly uses email for written communication, faxing by email is now possible with our email-to-fax feature.

To make this option operational, you first need to perform the necessary system configuration. We start by setting up the desired email address for the user who will then be able to send email to fax from that address.

It is important that the selected e-mail address is assigned to a user, otherwise, the fax sending will fail.  If the e-mail address from which you want to fax is not assigned to any user(s) of the PBX, the service will not work. It is therefore necessary to assign the required e-mail address to the required user within the PBX portal.

Once we have met all of the above conditions for the email-to-fax function, we can begin sending the fax via email. For this, we need to know the fax number to which we want to send the email in fax format. We will use this 11-digit number within the email address we send the email to. The format of the address is this 11-digit number and @instant-fax.com, so if, for example, the other party's fax has the number (202) 123-4567, we would enter their international address before the @ sign. The resulting email address will then be in the form 12021234567@nstant-fax.com.

Fax caller ID when sending outgoing fax by email

In case we need the recipient of the fax to be able to get our Caller ID as a number to send the fax back to, the necessary configuration needs to be done by Vulcan Telecom. Please, therefore, do not hesitate to contact us in case of such a request. We will be happy to implement the necessary settings for you.

Receiving Inbound Fax Notifications by Email

To receive incoming fax notifications via email, you need to select the notification method you want to use on the User Voicemail tab. This is similar to the setup for voicemail notifications.

More attachments

When sending a fax via email, we can attach multiple attachments to the email. We can combine the types of these attachments, so we can attach both text files and images. Our system will then merge all attachments into one PDF document before sending it to the fax number. The resulting file is merged from the individual attachments in alphabetical order according to the name of the files we put in the attachment. This allows us to control how the final fax from multiple attachments will look. So, if we are concerned that some text should be followed by an image at the beginning of the fax and continued with more text, we choose the attachment names to go in the order we want. Ideally, in this case, the individual attachment files should be named with the number of the desired order at the beginning of the file name. The files can then be named like this. 1Greeting.doc, 2image.jpg, 3maintext.pdf. This will ensure that the final merged PDF will start with a greeting, followed by an image, and then the main text will be appended.

Instant Fax ATA

We propose utilizing Instant Fax ATA's as part of your fax solution if you need to send/receive faxes from a fax machine. An Instant Fax ATA is a proprietary piece of hardware that connects to the fax machine's ethernet and RJ11 ports to deliver Fax Over IP.

FAX Using a SIP ATA

A fax may be routed to a SIP ATA device on the WebCentrex platform just like any other call. Faxes routed in this manner will use either T.38 or G711 for transmission. You may change the transmission mode by changing the codec options on the SIP device.

Technologically, traditional faxes rely on an analog representation of a digital signal. This is the familiar chirp and chirp that we hear as the "fax tone".  Unfortunately, this analog representation is very susceptible to variations in the transmission of fax data.

The above limitation in practice means that faxes are often interrupted by jitter and latency in the last mile: by the last mile, we mean the last part of the path between the PBX and the end user's fax machine.

Most VoIP service providers avoid deploying faxes using SIP ATA because of this high unreliability. Therefore, we, as Vulcan Telecom, recommend choosing an Instant Fax ATA system for fax services in the need of conventional fax machine.