Will my medical alert system and fax machine still operate if I have them connected to my BasicTalk phone?

NO basic talk will not be able to send or receive faxes. It's possible that it'll function with your fax machine and medical emergency equipment. However, because it is a VoIP-based service, it is not recommended to rely on it.

However, the medical alert, fax, and phone must all be combined into a single ht701 input. Look for uk on Amazon. BT is an acronym for British Telecom. RJ11 2 Pcs Male to 3 Female 3 Way Triple Adaptor Splitter FAX / Modem or Other RJ11 Telephone RJ11 Three-Way Adapter Splitter.

BasicTalk does not provide a separate fax line, nor does it support fax service over a phone line. While you may connect a fax machine to the BasicTalk Box and use the service for the odd fax, there is no support available if you run into problems.

Is it possible to send a fax via the internet?

Yes, technically, a company may send and receive faxes through a VoIP network. However, the more you learn about VoIP, the less confidence you will be in entrusting it with your company's critical fax communications, particularly if you fax frequently.

And, if you're not acquainted with VoIP, here's a quick rundown of what it is and how it works.

What is the relationship between VoIP and fax?

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is a voice-over-IP (VoIP) communication protocol that allows users to transfer voice across previously data-only networks. Instead of delivering a discussion through a typical circuit-based telephone network, VoIP turns the sounds in your phone call — the speakers' voices and any background noises — into a sequence of data packets. These packets are similar to envelopes in that they contain the bits that make up the voice call.

VoIP packets go via your local area network (LAN) and/or wide area network (WAN), as well as across the Internet, where they are mixed up with many other packets including email messages, word documents, spreadsheets, photos, and other data. The voice packets are isolated from the other "data" packets at the receiving end and reconstructed to reconstruct the words that were just uttered.

Naturally, all of this must happen in a fraction of a second, making VoIP packets extremely time-sensitive; if a packet holding a fragment of a word is delayed or comes out of sequence, it is meaningless and must be destroyed. This results in the occasional blips and dropouts seen in VoIP phone calls, particularly if they go over the public Internet, where network congestion can cause packets to be delayed or lost.

Converting voice to packets with VoIP technology makes sense for a number of reasons, the first of which is the significant cost savings that can be realised by consolidating numerous forms of corporate communications that formerly required numerous specialised networks onto a single connection.

Compression, which reduces the amount of bandwidth used for phone conversations, is a related advantage. VoIP does more than convert analogue voice communications to digital format; it may also reduce that data significantly. When digitised, a typical phone call uses 64 kilobits per second (kbps) of bandwidth per call.

Before making a phone call via the Internet, VoIP providers can compress the amount of bits in a phone call to as few as 32, 16, 8, or even 4kbps (with associated sound quality drawbacks). This adds up to significant savings for a major corporation or call centre, where employees make hundreds or even thousands of calls a day.

However, there is a snag. Although many types of data, such as speech, documents, and video, can handle and even profit from compression, analogue fax tones cannot.

And this is when the fax's VoIP issues begin.

How Does Fax Work In A VoIP Environment – And Why Does It Fail...

When sending fax via an IP network or VoIP service, there are two main issues to consider.

The first issue is that fax cannot be compressed, thus it must be digitised and transmitted as a full-rate 64Kbps data stream via IP. That may not seem like a big deal in a low-volume faxing environment, but it adds up quickly in a high-volume faxing environment, especially during peak hours when everyone is attempting to transmit papers or make phone calls at the same time. Because most VoIP conversations are compressed to 32 kbps or fewer, fax takes up at least double the amount of bandwidth as a compressed VoIP conversation. There's also the IP packet overhead, which raises the necessary bandwidth to about 88kbps, or at least 175 percent more than a VoIP connection.

Second, packet delay and packet loss have a low tolerance in fax. Large data files may be compressed and "packetized," or broken down into smaller discrete packets of information, and then delivered over the Internet, which is one of IP's advantages. This technique appends a ‘header' to each individual packet containing destination and source IP addresses (similar to the “to” and “from” addresses on a postal envelope) — as well as information about the packet's position in the larger data sequence (“I'm the fourth piece in a seven-piece series that makes up part of this fax”), and where it's going (“Here's the IP address of the computer where this fax is being sent to”).

This implies that IP enables the network to choose the quickest and clearest path for each packet to reach its destination. This can result in elements of the communication arriving out of order, such as an email message. However, the procedure remains reliable since the header information aids the system in putting the document back together nearly quickly after it arrives at the recipient's end. If any packets are lost along the route, they can be resent until the entire message has been constructed.

This works well for papers and email, where a few seconds of delay is barely noticeable, but not so well for ‘real-time' conversations, and the delay in Fax might be fatal.

You've probably been on a phone conversation where someone fades out for a few seconds and you miss a word or two. That means a packet(s) did not make it to the other end of its VoIP journey to your phone, or arrived too late, in which case it was deleted. All you have to do in certain situations is ask the other individual to repeat their previous phrase. In other circumstances, believe it or not, a word or two is dropped, and your brain is able to interpolate the missing information without you even recognising it. This explains how, despite its flaws, voice was able to make the shift to IP.

A fax, on the other hand, cannot be compressed and cannot take even a small percentage of packet loss – even a 1% packet loss combined with more than a few seconds of delay can cause the connection to time out and the fax to fail. It also can't take a pause in the packet sequence because it would cause further delay. Any of these problems might be misinterpreted by the recipient's fax machine as a fault with the incoming fax, causing the transmission to be terminated.

The second difficulty is that fax transmissions have a poor tolerance for faults with interoperability. Hundreds of millions of operational fax machines throughout the world employ a variety of fax protocols, the most common of which are T.30, T.38, and G.711, as well as speeds like V.14 or V.34, whereas VoIP normally utilises G.729 to compress calls and conserve bandwidth.

When a fax is sent over an analogue network, such as the phone system, the two fax machines converse with one another and agree on the kind of transmission and speed. When a fax is sent through VoIP, however, any pauses in the tones cause the recipient's fax machine to malfunction.

When a fax travels via a VoIP network from a machine that uses one protocol to a machine that expects another, the system may experience gaps in the fax's analogue tones as it tries to resolve the protocol difficulties. The fax machines misread the gaps and go out of rhythm with one another.

When a fax is delivered, for example, if the VoIP network is configured to use G.729 compression, it must switch to G.711 for uncompressed transmission. When the VoIP system tries to negotiate between the two protocols, there are small gaps in the fax tones, which might cause the fax to fail. The longer the fax is, the less likely it is to be received.

Someday, T.38 could come to the rescue. The improved T.38 protocol was designed to send faxes directly over IP (FoIP), eliminating the requirement to convert the fax first to an audio stream. Two T.38-capable fax machines should theoretically be able to interact through VoIP.

T.38, on the other hand, has to be present on both ends of a network to function, and many service providers have never deployed it. If the fax needs to travel through networks that don't support T.38, it will have to be transcoded, which will add latency, expense, and may result in the connection being disconnected. Furthermore, manufacturers have implemented the spec in a variety of ways, thus the T.38 on one machine may not be interoperable with equipment from another vendor. As a result, there is a breakdown in communication.

The Information Highway is inaccessible to fax machines.

Consider a traditional analogue fax transmission as a presidential motorcade to have a better understanding of the particular issues that Internet Protocol poses for faxing. Fax was created with the intention of providing a dedicated and direct connection between sender and recipient. Fax used to travel through a separate circuit that it didn't have to share with anyone on the old telephone network. To return to our motorcade analogy, here is where all cross-traffic is prohibited to maintain the motorcade's high and continuous pace, and where all of the automobiles in the motorcade may remain in their original order for the duration of the voyage. Simply said, all fax lanes are cleared from start to end, ensuring that there are no delays.

A VoIP or other IP-based network, on the other hand, was built for complicated and ever-changing traffic patterns – think of it as a 12-lane motorway with a constant stream of real-time and non-real-time data packets (cars) zigzagging in and out of lanes. Some data packets arrive in a different order than they were sent; others may be re-routed or even stalled on the road for a few seconds, causing the completed data transfer to wait until they arrive and can be stitched back together in order at the recipient's end.

Fax is a lane-hogging gadget that was never intended to share its lane with anybody else. As a result, when fax is presented with late or lost packets, it simply stops down.

That's why, at eFax Corporate, we tell IT professionals who inquire, "sure, theoretically, you may send or receive a business fax over a VoIP network — but doing so may cause your company more difficulties than it solves."

So, Now That You've Migrated, What Can You Do About Fax?

It's tempting to try to figure out how to transition your company's older fax infrastructure to your new IP environment. After all, IP improves efficiency, saves money, and allows your IT department to consolidate many of the communications technologies that it previously had to manage and repair individually.

But, if we've persuaded you that fax won't benefit from the same IP advantages that your other data communications do, the issue becomes: What can you do to update, simplify, and increase the efficiency of your old fax infrastructure?

According to our assessment, you have four choices:

1. You may continue to pay for dedicated telecom services while keeping your existing fax infrastructure in place. This is somewhat secure, at least for the time being, but it fails to resolve many of your current faxing difficulties while also creating new ones. Maintaining an older in-house fax infrastructure is both expensive and time-consuming for your company's IT staff. A legacy fax environment is also inefficient, as you are aware because you manage it.

2. If you've switched to IP and are having problems with faxing, you can revert to expensive analogue lines for each fax number (or to a full onsite network of fax servers and fax machines that also require their own numbers over digital T1 lines). For the IT department, it's a major setback, but for your telecommunications provider, it's a joyful turn of events.

3. Wait for a new protocol to be introduced by the standards organisations that addresses the concerns with fax-over-IP such as latency, jitter, packet loss, and other concerns of dependability. Keep in mind that protocols like G.711, T.37, T.38, and others are still in use decades after they were first introduced. As a result, you may find yourself waiting a long period for the ideal, standard-body answer.

4. Make the switch to a cloud-based fax service. Because the fax is converted into an email attachment, which is independent of the underlying network technology, eFax Corporate's cloud faxing solutions provide the appropriate platform for distributing faxes across IP networks. The fax has evolved into a sequence of data packets that travel through a data network. And that's it! Users may now send and receive faxes right from their desktop, with a detailed audit record of each fax made and received.