[frv103]

These requirements for faxing are becoming almost silly. Not only is the PSTN infrastructure in some areas so bad (40 year old corroded copper lines and such) that there are potential problems every time it rains, but incumbent carriers are trying to do everything they can to rip down what is left of the copper infrastructure. I don’t blame them as this makes practical and financial sense (remove copper phone lines, replace with fiber, offer data and voice through the fiber).

The dream is that the PSTN will be done away with entirely, with all traffic going through the internet.

A big problem is with fax machine manufacturers simply claiming that their machines “are not voip compatible” which is ridiculous, but the extra effort involved with getting faxes to work smoothly over voip can be a nightmare, and not something any vendor wants to be involved in supporting.

The result of this is clients with $15k fax machines reporting a myriad of problems, which the fax machine vendor claims that the only solution is a PSTN phone line for the machine, which in many areas is no longer possible due to the incumbent carrier phasing out the infrastructure or making it incredibly difficult to obtain.

There are a lot of “Efax” services whose purpose is to get around this problem by making the “fax” step just a transparent formality to appease regulatory constraints. Users can send an email with a specially formatted subject, then the “efax” company will actually “fax” the document specified in the email to a phone number owned by the efax company, which is then emailed to the intended receiver.

[Aloha]

Anyone who does claim that fax works well over VoIP is full of shit - in my opinion. If you're an occasional faxer, and only send short faxes you'll likely have pretty good luck with VoIP - but in most cases, you'll have better luck with a dirty but functional PSTN line (V.34 modems are pretty tolerant of noise) I'll note though, in many cases, the desire by the carriers isn't to replace copper - its just to eliminate PSTN service - see AT&T U-Verse, which is FTTN, not FTTP.

Either because of poor implementation or a lack of universal uptake T.38 doesn't seem to solve the problem well enough to resolve the issues.

E-Fax is the current best end solution - but adoption is slow, or lacking.

What I'd like to see is a universal, easy to use encryption system come into use, so we could just send this stuff over email.

[patrickg_zill]

It can work, but there are many ways it can fail.

Even with the T38 protocol: this protocol is simply not very robust and does not have much error-correction built into it.

[dvtrn]

The dream is that the PSTN will be done away with entirely, with all traffic going through the internet

How far off the mark am I in thinking that part of this dream you have, that was left unstated is that 'all traffic going through the internet' assumes we've fixed the last mile problem of broadband connectivity to rural areas? Because otherwise that dream effectively cuts a lot of people off from the rest of the world.

[Spooky23]

It’s already happening. My parents regularly deal with days long outages with PSTN service. Hell, in the middle of Albany, NY Verizon landlines were broken for 1-6 weeks due to some legacy hardware failure.

The companies want to replace the copper with wireless service because the regulatory environment is more profitable, even though they sell fully depreciated copper at $40/mo.

[metildaa]

Internet access outside of cities and suburbs is pretty awful, there are lots of businesses and residences plugging away with flakey, capped internet and lifeline phone service.

Worse yet, those running what service there is can go out oof business or hang up on users they don't want, and your totally SOL: https://www.cnet.com/news/in-rural-farm-country-forget-broad...