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MITvoip Telephone: Faxing

Overview

MIT does not provide Internet fax service at this time. However, IS&T expects to implement some fax services in the next several months and is currently assessing the possibilities. Traditional fax machines will remain in place until a reliable Internet fax service is implemented.

This page discusses possible future Internet fax solutions. The actual services might differ somewhat from these descriptions.

To use this technology now, consider commercial Internet fax solutions such as eFax, RapidFAX, or faxZERO.

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Pilot Service

IS&T is planning to launch a pilot of the inbound Internet fax service in Summer 2008. Outbound Internet faxing will not be included in this pilot. Please note that the pilot service is for testing and development and therefore is not fully robust or reliable. It is not recommended for use in business-critical contexts.

This pilot will be limited to a small number of colleagues. If you are interested in participating in the pilot or have any questions, please write to voip-transition-team@mit.edu.

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About Internet Faxing

Traditional faxing transmits a scanned image as pulses over a phone line to another fax machine, which then prints the scanned image. Internet faxing instead converts the scan into a graphic image format (e.g., TIFF) and transmits it over the data network.

Inbound Faxes

The new fax service will not use a fax machine to receive inbound faxes. Users will be issued individual MIT fax telephone numbers. Faxes sent to these telephone numbers will generate an email to the user with the fax enclosed as an attachment.

This is similar to MITvoip's Voice Mail by Email feature, which sends voice mail messages to your email address as audio file attachments.

A pilot of this service is planned for Summer 2008.

Outbound Faxes

Creating an outbound Internet fax service poses more technical challenges than inbound faxing. Because it is more complex, outbound faxing will probably take a few months longer to test and implement than inbound faxing. Therefore, traditional telephone wiring will be left in place for existing fax machines, so you will not lose your fax service when your group transitions to MITvoip telephone service.

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