Asterisk
For a long time I’ve been meaning to join the voip revolution and develop a solution with Asterisk for my personal use. Once I’d tested it for a while, my goal was to develop a decent voicemail-to-email solution rather than play a few thousand dollars for some black-box to be added to our business PBX.
Couple days ago I finally purchase a set of equipment as I could begin working on this goal. A set of OEM X100P – FXO cards plus an ATA device. This guy has purchased the OEM X100P card and had a good experience, so I’m expecting things to go well with the hardware.
One of the things that really interest me is Asterisk fax. Using spandsp its possible to turn the OEM X100P, which is a winmodem, into a software based fax. According to a FAQ:
The higher speed modems for FAX are encumbered by patents at this time. spandsp implements only unencumbered standards, so it may be distributed freely. The faster modems used for FAX – principally V.17, and V.34 – are supported by a surprisingly small percentage of FAX machines used today. The last time I checked the logs of a large public access FAX server, which supports V.29 and V.17, only a 2% to 3% of calls used V.17. The remainder used V.29. Unless a lot of your FAX traffic is with companies using high-end FAX machines, you problem won’t miss the higher speeds very much.
My second goal is to develop a stable inward fax-to-email gateway. Our business fax machine goes though almost 100 faxes per week, and about $100 per month of consumables.
Some useful information for NZ is located here: WLUG-Wiki – Asterisk, and Scoot has developed some really clever ideas with asterisk.