Legacy Fax Support

[DanWillett]

Here is a feature, that should be fairly simple to add to the Obi110.

Legacy Fax Gateway

Be able to connect a regular fax machine to the Obi110, and when the user dials a fax number, the Obi110 converts it to a pdf (or tiff) file and e-mails it to the fax server of their choice.

I.E. the user punches in 540-555-1212 into their fax machine, the obi converts it to a pdf and sends it to 5405551212@userfaxserver.com, also would be good to have a phone book, so you can add specific entries to the phone book that will be sent via e-mail instead of through the fax server.

i.e. you could have in your phone book 540-555-5555 as user@mail.com and when the person punches in 540-555-5555 into the fax machine, it converts it to a pdf and emails it to user@mail.com

There are a couple of different devices that do this, but most are tied to a specific fax service, and the one that wasn't, was priced to high ($500) and the company went out of business (Legacy 3000 Lanlink internet fax -- http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-3000-Lanlink-Internet-System/dp/B0036WFYE6 ) and now the last few remaining stock are being sold off at what should have been the original target price ( $50 to $70 )

Anyway, like I said, this should be fairly easy to add to the Obi110, and all of the setup could be done through the web interface, no need to add any buttons or displays to the Obi110...

There is a huge market for this...  the IT guy at most companies could handle the installation, and the users would not need any re-training...  and the companies would be able to eliminate their land line fax lines and go with a much more cost effective fax service.

Anyway, I love the Obi110, and I have other uses of it (I installed one recently, and I will be ordering a few more, but if fax was added, I would be buying even more...)

I think you are the guys capable of doing this...

[DanWillett]

I know several people who would buy an Obi110 just for the fax support if it was added...  any feedback here?

[texasguy]

Units "cpu" might not be able to handle graphics and/or e-mailing large files.

[bodywave]

Having the OBi ATA decode fax and encode PDF would be a pretty big deal, definitely more intensive than a small piece of inexpensive hardware could handle. On the other hand, I think OBi should seriously consider adding T.38 support, which would make them more competitive against Cisco SPA2102/SPA3102.

To anybody who cares enough about this thread to be reading this: We need to be realistic and understand that OBi is currently most popular with the home/consumer audience. That's natural, because Google Voice support is THE key feature which sets OBi apart from Grandstream and Cisco. If you care about OBi's fax support, you're probably a SOHO business. I think there's huge opportunity ahead for OBi in the small business market, but if we give OBi the impression that we'll settle for nothing less than a HylaFax equivalent, I think OBi might decide they can't afford to invest what it would take (a lot of work and extra component expenses).

[GC_convertee]

I'd love if they could make a fax to pdf converter or pdf to fax converter for cheap - like a fax gateway ?
Two uses are:
- Someone faxes something to a phone number that talks to ur obi, it converts it to pdf, tiff, whatever and stores and/or emails it
- On your local computer, you send a document to it , the obiserver (email, webserver file browser, etc) , pdf, tiff, text, img and it converts and sends it to a fax destination over a phone line

Like other's have mentioned, the small hardware and software will have to be bolstered somewhat