The Fax T.30 protocol, which has been around in its present form for nearly 30 years, was designed to operate over a telephone system that, by and large, no longer exists. However, in those 30 years, an installed base of over 100 million fax machines has come into existence and most of those machines are used daily. The continued and persistent use of fax world wide, in spite of the growth of alternative communications such as email, has left 10, 15 and even 20 year old fax terminals in wide spread use.
Then there are additional attractions of fax: fax leaves a paper trail and that trail is considered as legal proof of document delivery as well as document archiving. Combine this with its ease of use and lack of any requirement for computer literacy, and even corporations are moving to install substantial document management systems based on facsimile transmission.
Yet, even with all this going for it, facsimile is a challenge. Much of the protocol is commonly violated when implemented in terminals and new equipment must be rigorously tested to verify its interoperability with the enormous installed base. It is the specific purpose of QualityLogic’s FaxLab® to verify this interoperability using only a host computer and a ChannelTrap test modem. Carrier service providers and carrier equipment, fax and MFP manufacturers can even create an end-to-end test system using FaxLab with multiple ChannelTrap hardware devices to identify T.30 fax message degradation caused the network transport.
DataProbe T30 Analyzer facilitates monitoring fax transmissions in order to analyze their conformity to the T.30 protocol and isolate the causes of interoperability problems. It can perform this function on both the analog PSTN and digital IP signals that carry fax over both the telephone system and the Internet.
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