Simple fax question

[american10]

Hello everyone. I am setting up my first 3CX system. Simple setup, 2 phones, 2 DIDs, 2 extensions.

Everything is working great so far, but the last step is setting up the fax. We have a regular fax machine (part of a brother All-In-One laser printer). I have read guides on here that give tutorials on how to setup it with specific hardware.

I guess my question is really just this: What hardware do I need to hook up one traditional fax machine to send and receive faxes? There seem to be a lot of choices. Which is the "go to" ATA box?

 

[american10]

Does anyone have experience with the Cisco SPA122?

https://www.amazon.com/Cisco-SPA122-Sma ... s=snom+ata

 

[leejor]

I've used the previous ATA incarnations from Cisco/Linksys, with a fax machine, with no issues so I don't foresee a problem with the newer versions. I would hope, that, if anything, they are even more reliable.

That said fax over IP is not a given. All pieces of the chain must be in place, and even then there can still be problems. All devices must be set to use t.38. In most cases, the fax manufacturer has usually has settings suggestions when the device is going to be used over VoIP, look for them. Your trunk provider must support t.38, some do, some don't. Check with them if you're not sure.

 

[John Ranger]

Hi American 10,

we are using some Cisco SPA 112 with two analog phone ports and Standard Epson All-in-one-Printers/Fax attached. We don't use T.38 but "normal" analog T.30 faxing over this Cisco SPA and the 3CX and it works quite well and reliable.

Important for such a successful solution seemed for us to be:

- Stable, "high Speed" Internet Access (we have at the 3CX Location a VDSL with 40MBit down and 10 Mbit up but it also worked with 20/2 Mbit/s)
- We also have site-to-site VPNs which Connects to our main site where the 3Cx is located (one within the same Country at a super high Speed Internet Connection 300/300 MBit/s) and another in a different Country with a very low Speed Internet Connection (2/0.8 MBit/s) which even sometimes has lost connection

The one fax at the Ultra high Speed Location works very well even over VPN
The fax at the low Speed Location I have not yet tested as I am just setting it up (will post an update here later)​

- Stable, low latency Internet Connection (we have ping round trip times to Google's DNS with IP 8.8.8.8 of around 13ms at the 3CX location)
- Stable, not overloaded inhouse Networking (we have 1GBit/s Switches and CAT6 cabling and QoS for Voip traffic in place)
- Experience with Powerline Networking shows that this renders analog faxing over VoiP unusable (too unstable with regard to round trip times)
- VoiP Provider in the same Country as the 3CX Location and connected to a high bandwidth Backbone
- Configuring everywhere to only use G.711 u-law and -a-law codecs (SIP trunk, extensions)

Here a link to the device at Cisco:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/unified-communications/spa112-2-port-phone-adapter/index.html

And here a comparison between the spa 112 (we have) and the 122 you want to buy:
http://blog.voipdiy.com/2013/02/cisco-spa112-spa122-voip-ata-whats.html

So if you don't ned another NAT router and DHCP Server you will be better off with an SPA 112 as this is just the "normal" ata while the SPA 122 includes a NAT router and DHCP Server.

Hope this helps.

With Kind regards,

John