Asterfax, samgoma and mass faxing

We are currently spending thousands a month using Interfax.net to send faxes for our billing application. I’m looking at moving it inhouse onto my Asterisk box with Asterfax. I was going to purchase a:

A20002D Sangoma Remora A20002D PCI Card 0 FXS / 4 FXO Ports + Echo Cancellation

I’ve been reading here that echo cancellation can mess up faxing and am wondering about any recommendations for hardware before I buy anything. There is no VOIP involved here, and fax volume will be about 10000 pages/day but growing to 3x that within the next 6 months.

I don’t necessarily have to use Asterisk if someone has another suggestion, but it was free and the SMTP option in AsterFax would work easily when it comes to integrating with our software. Thanks for any suggestions.

Cheers, Rob

Hi Not sure about sangoma cards, But the echo can is turned off when “fax/data” tones are heard. This can be seen in the logs

As to the hardware, you are woefully undersized for growth, You need to work out how long it takes to send a page the multply that by 10000
My desktop fax takes about 50 seconds to fax a page in total. so thats

((10000 * 50) / 60)/60 = 139 hours of faxes. so if faxing 24 hours a day thats 6 lines. and at a cent a min thats $83.00 a day

Ian

otoh as calculated thats 250,000 mins/month, and with traffic like that you should be able to negotiate directly with a CLEC and get a better rate…

my plan for phone lines was just to put in lines with unlimited local and LD calling. start with 4 lines and see how that goes then add more if/when needed.

it would be cheaper for me to go with a digium card with no hardware echo cancellation. would that make more sense?

Hi

Ok
Two problems here.

  1. You will proberly fall foul of the suppliers “fair use” clause very quickly.
  2. You allready need more lines than you spec’ed.

TBH to do this you need to look at using a T1/E1. A few reasons for this are.

  1. They will be able to rip calls up and down quicker.
  2. You will be able to grow quickly
  3. Less echo problems

hmm, ok that might be doable. they have a t1 in the richmond office, i might be able to put the hardware there. i guess if i went that route i would need different hardware for the asterisk box.

The figures I was provided turned out to be way overboard. I just contacted our fax provider and we’re actually doing around 20,000 pages per MONTH currently. That changes things obviously and makes starting out with POTS lines a possibility. That’s about 5000 minutes/line/month (at 1min/page) with 4 lines - or less than 3 hours/day/line. I would hope that wouldn’t set off any terms of agreement alarms at Verizon.

mmm… also if you go by carrier assuming 1min/page thats 20k / 100 = 200 dollars/mo if you get a prepay provider and pay 1c/min…