Typical Fax Error Rates

Our faxing system has about a 1% error rate to a traditional analog or digital lines. Unfortunately, many endpoints are poorly designed fax over IP (FoIP) endpoints.  So, adding VoIP faxes to and from us, the error rate is 5% outbound and 8% inbound.

The Error Reduction Process

  • We provide you a 2nd diagnostic fax number, managed by our fax carrier partner, that your customer can send faxes to. We hope for success to this 2nd number.
  • If the 2nd number does not provide success;
    • First ask the sender to reboot their fax machine or server.
    • a sender fax call example must be reported to us (time/date as seen on a cell phone for accuracy , sending telephone number, receiving telephone number)
    • we may need to collect some information from the fax sender.

Observations from our industry peers say a 6% error rate is typical

Fax transmission is an analog technology. It’s modem tones transmitted over a phone line at around 2100 hz. In the old days of analog lines, what fax is based on, we saw error rates of 6%. Like making a copy of an (analog)  cassette tape, analog fax tones can be compressed and re-transmitted that yield literally a poor sounding copy of the original fax transmission.  Today, in the day of voice over IP VoIP and without our services,  we see as much as a 20% error rate. Beyond our data, below is third party evidence.

” no one will sign off on it but you are looking at 5 – 7%”  – industry expert. We can play the name of this person and company privately.

… googling the phrase https://www.google.com/search?&q=typical+facsimile+error+rate

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“When attempting to send real-time faxes over an IP network that is operating under normal conditions, a success rate of 80% is reasonable for single-page faxes. ”

https://www.dialogic.com/-/media/products/docs/whitepapers/11148-reliable-fax-voip-wp.pdf

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“Traditional analog faxing has roughly a 5% failure rate; e-faxing has a slightly higher failure rate around 5-8% due to the additional steps necessary with a fax server. ”

https://www.reed.edu/cis/help/telephones/efaxing.html

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“Fax over internet, FoIP, had formerly been unable to achieve a transmission success rate of more than 85%”

https://www.faxbetter.com/corporate/wholesale.aspx