Dealing with Increasing Fax Volumes
As your clients increase their fax volume and they will based upon ever changing regulatory and compliance requirements. They need to consider separating out sending and receiving functions. Obviously a single fax machine cannot send out a fax while receiving one. Also if it is a multi-function device it might not be able to handle all the internal tasks at the same time as fax tasks. Regardless of the unique environment and needs of your clients off-loading fax to dedicated machine makes sense.
We often get complaints of delays in receiving faxes only to find that the client has been very busy sending out faxes so have been unable to receive their queued faxes. Our system will automatically keep trying to deliver these faxes usually over a few days before timing out. Once timed out we will have to manually push them through. But of more concern to your clients will be the delay in receiving what could be critical faxes.
To avoid this, the best approach is enable line 2 in the portal by assigning it a DID. You can then move or add a send only fax machine to line 2. Most clients have their primary fax number on Line 1 already so will expect to receive faxes on that machine. This can be swapped around if you like and in either case does require a reboot of the ATA to apply the changes. Enabling line 2 and providing it DID does provide a fail over option should there be an issue with Line 1 for any reason.
by William Jordan, FaxSIPit Manager of Operations