Faxportal: Distributed Fax Transportation for Internet Fax Services

Abstract

Internet faxing circumvents expensive international telephone toll charges in transcontinental fax exchanges by using the Internet as an intermediary medium to transport fax messages between senders and recipients. To make Internet faxing successful, it is necessary to provide sufficient global coverage. However, this is difficult to achieve as magnitudes of servers and fax modem pools have to be deployed, together with technical personnel for support and maintenance. These will increase costs that will eventually have to be passed on to the user. This paper proposes a distributed fax transportation mechanism that utilizes existing Internet faxing services as secondary resources to provide coverage for fax communication. The transportation mechanism has been implemented in the FaxPortal system, which supports different modes of Internet fax services including Mail-to-Fax through an electronic mail client, Web-to-Fax through a Web interface, and Fax-to-Fax through a conventional fax device.