Faxing With Asterisk Solution From Digium, "Fax For Asterisk"

Faxing for Asterisk
It has been a while a long while I wrote about faxing with Asterisk. I wrote about Asterfax in 2006 and since then there have been a few Faxing with Asterisk methods that came about. Pika offered Faxing On Asterisk sometime back. Then another solution from Pika connected Skype to Asterisk and and provided DSP based Faxing. Then Asterfax became Noojee Fax and we were all still looking for a solid solution fax with Asterisk. There were some providers offering T.38 service for faxing over VOIP.
Lately mod_fax was presented for Freeswitch which provided fax support via spandsp. But that was not all and our fascination with fax over Asterisk could be seen here.

But the reason for writing this post to let you know that Digium has released "Fax for Asterisk" for both commercial andopen source Asterisk. This completes another gap left in Asterisk as Digium is providing the backing for faxing this time. One channel fax for Asterisk is available from Digium for free and available to download from Digium Webstore. Multi channel solution could be purchased for a low one time fee of $38.50 per channel.
Either choice you select, it feels good to have Digium behind your back.
Note: Fax For Asterisk is supported only on x86 Linux environments; x86_64 is not currently supported. Users of x86_64 systems should install 32-bit compatibility modes in order to use Fax For Asterisk.

Press Release;

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—April 6, 2009—Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, today announced Fax For Asterisk, a complete, cost-effective platform for the development of fax solutions. The offering provides Asterisk users and integrators a suite of user-friendly applications and a licensed version of the industry-leading fax modem software from Commetrex. To meet the demanding requirements of business users, Fax For Asterisk provides reliable faxing across the Internet and public switched telephone network (PSTN).

Asterisk is the most widely used open source telephony platform. The software is available free of charge and has been downloaded millions of times for use by individual developers and systems integrators creating custom telephony solutions for businesses. Asterisk is also available as the professional-grade and commercially supported Asterisk Business Edition.

“Asterisk users, developers and integrators now have a toolkit allowing them to integrate fax with their phone systems,” said Bill Miller, vice president of product management at Digium. “With Fax For Asterisk, Digium offers a reliable and fully supported fax solution.”

Fax For Asterisk interoperates with standards-compliant fax machines connected to Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6 on x86 Linux systems. It provides low-speed PSTN faxing via DAHDI-compatible telephony interface cards as well as VoIP faxing to T.38-compatible SIP end points and service providers. Fax For Asterisk operates at speeds up to 14.4kbps and supports V.17, V.27 and V.29 fax modems.

Fax For Asterisk is available free of charge from the Digium webstore at http://store.digium.com/ for one concurrent fax session. Multi-session licenses are available for a one-time fee of $38.50 per channel. Fax For Asterisk is available immediately. Fax capabilities for Digium’s Switchvox IP PBX were announced in February of this year and are based on this solution. For more details, visit www.digium.com.

Tags: Asterisk Fax, Faxing on Asterisk, Noojee Fax, fax for Asterisk, mod_fax, Digium webstore