sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems ESI Telephones & Systems IP200e Incoming Faxes not routing automatically

Our system runs on the auto-attendant and is set up to route incoming faxes to one of three dedicated analog extensions with Fax machines.

It has worked well at times and at other times will not receive an incoming fax and automatically route it at all. The call will get routed to the Operator group.

I have adjusted the 165-4 Fax Energy Level (CNG tone) incrementally down to 35 (default 70) with no improvement.

Additionally, I have extended timings beyond default for the 165-1 Auto Attendant Inter-digit Timer up to 1 sec (100)

Failure rate on tests is nearly 100%

I have raised the CO Line Receive Volume from 10 (default) to 11 with not improvement.

What is the best way to proceed in troubleshooting this issue?

We depend upon Faxes for many of our incoming orders and confirmations.

Thanks for any feedback or information that might be helpful!

If you depend on faxes and they are mission critical get dedicated fax lines.

POTS lines cost roughly $25 per month and you don't pay per minute for incoming faxes.

Fax detect has never been 100% reliable... and with all of the VOIP circuits in use by the CLEC's it has gotten worse.

And... in my experience the ESI systems do it pretty well ... my old Avaya Partner ACS with Partner Messaging had a much higher failure rate.

Bottom line is if it is important to your business spend the $100 per month and do it the right way.

All of our lines are POTS, but they all go into the IP200e.

I guess what you are suggesting is to route a dedicated line directly to each of the three fax machines we have. Then, we would have to set up the service from the Telco so the single fax number rotates to the next line, same as our voice lines do.

As I recall, our lines are more like $40 a month, each. So that would be $120/mo. to support three of them. (plus any additional services)

What I was hoping for was a response from someone who was experienced with the IP200e Fax setup and the variables that affect detection of an incoming Fax tone.

If I had a more detailed understanding of how the Fax part of the system works, perhaps I could fine-tune it to get an acceptable level of performance.

At this point all I can find is the paragraph of information in the Installer's Guide regarding setting the Fax Energy Level.

If there is someone reading this forum who has actually made this work "pretty well" I would appreciate any shared knowledge that might be helpful.

Well ..... hate to be the bearer of bad news .. but ...

I have been in the phone industry since 1997 and have always been told by people with more experience than i have that fax detection is "iffy" at best.... there are so many variables that it just won't ever work well.

If your fax volume is so heavy that you need three machines for incoming faxes then $120 per month doesn't seem like an inordinate amount. If a chunk of your volume is outgoing faxes they could remain on the system.

Also.. since a chunk of the volume of the usage on your existing lines is from the fax machines then perhaps you could remove a line, or even two, from your hunt group and put that into the fax hunt group since that traffic will no longer be on the main lines.

My guess is you won't find too many phone techs with much experience troubleshooting this stuff. Every hour spent troubleshooting / fine tuning a technology that is known to be less than perfect will cost customers money they could be spending on the proper solution... it wouldn't be in their best interest to recommend they pay to try and get something working that just won't... especially when faxes are so important to their business that they have three of them.

Have you considered some sort of e-fax / online option??

We just switch back from E-fax, as it was having reliability issues.

There's not a lot of traffic on our fax lines, it's just that we have the three machines in use and the system could be set up this way for the odd chance that two faxes came in at once.

I could set up the other two machines as outbound only on analog extensions and get a dedicated POTS line added for the inbound line.

Just was hoping I could get the feature to work better.

Thanks for the feedback.

Looks like that will be the way to solve the problem.

Don't worry about 2 faxes coming in at once if your volume is low. Fax machines aren't like people. They'll try again if they get a busy signal and they won't complain!!!

On the ESI when using the AA and fax detect doesn't it always route fax detect to the First analog port?

From what I understand, it routes to any extension designated as FAX.

If there's more than one, I'm guessing that it takes the extension with the lowest number first.