Patent Application
20150103379
The electronic transmission of documents by way of fax systems continues to be commonplace and, often, an essential component of many business activities. With the emergence of email and mobile computing devices in the business environment, many predicted the demise of fax, however fax continues to thrive and grow as it is the only means of communication to the existing base of fax machines, can print out paper, and offers compliance to many financial and regulatory requirements.
With the growth of VoIP (Voice over Internet), fax transmissions designed for the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) have more difficulty completing transmissions and require several retries to complete. Further, as the number of pages increase, the chances of successful transmissions decrease. Also, there is no page counting system in fax, so that a 100 page fax that cannot complete after 90 pages will start anew at page 1 the next attempt. And finally, that 100 page fax may take as long as an hour or more of a phone call to complete the transmission.
Facsimile (“fax” or “faxing”) has been an important part of business communications for over 20 years. It is a secure, and reliable way to send a document from one place to another and provides a confirmation of receipt. There have been few changes to the actual fax transmissions or speed since the early 1990's. With the growth of VoIP and the growth of fax, more problems are introduced to the fax process such as dropped calls, incomplete faxes, and longer documents that can take long periods of time sending.
Embodiments of the present inventive subject matter overcomes problems in the current fax system and in prior art of fax systems by using the fax transmission as a signal to securely stream the fax image data via the internet and secure link to a secure web server, thus giving a 100% delivery guarantee, and greatly reducing the transmission time. Embodiments of the present inventive subject matter are both novel in it's approach to increase fax speed and reliability, and non-obvious in it's method and approach.
Non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data may be reproduced by a non-featured facsimile machine, but the non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data will be rendered in a manner that does not produce intelligible human-readable information to the recipient.
Non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data is also multi-bit digital data representing non-facsimile-communication-protocol information wherein facsimile-communication-protocol information is signals or instructions to create/facilitate a communication channel between a transmitting device and a receiving device.
In summary, non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data is machine readable data that is transmitted in addition to conventional facsimile data wherein if the non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data is reproduced by the receiving facsimile machine, the non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data does not produce intelligible human-readable information as the receiving facsimile machine would render the concurrently transmitted conventional facsimile data.
Definition of Terms
The following term definitions are provided to assist in conveying an understanding of the various exemplary embodiments and features disclosed herein. The terms “facsimile” and “fax” shall be used interchangeably and refer to data that is transmitted on the protocol generically known as “T.30”.
Telephony: The transmission of audio signals on a PSTN (“Packet Switched Telephony Network”) according to generally accepted protocols.
T.30: The protocol for the transmission of facsimile documents that conform to the “Group-3” protocol. The Group 3 protocol is defined by the ITU, International Telecommunications Union
PSTN: The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the network of the world's public circuit-switched telephone networks.
ANI: Automatic Number Identification
CSID: Customer Subscriber ID
Non Standard Capabilities: Refers to the NSF (Non Standard Facilities), NSC (Non Standard Facilities Command), and NSS (Non Standard Facilities Set-up)
ATA: Analog Telephone Adapter, a device that interfaces a telephone handset or facsimile machine with an Ethernet data communications (internet) connection
Facsimile Information Fields (FIF): Information fields of variable length that contain specific information for the control and message interchange between two facsimile terminals.
Several different telephone line modulation techniques are used by fax machines. They are negotiated during the fax-modem handshake, and the fax devices will use the highest data rate that both fax devices support, usually a minimum of 14.4 kbit/s for Group 3 fax.
V.27: 2400 and 4800 bits/second
V.29: 4800, 7200, and 9600 bits/second
V.17: 7200, 9600, 12,200, and 14,400 bits/second
V.34bis: 28,800 and 33,600 bits/second
Data Communications Speeds: refers to data rate transfer speeds found on wired or wireless data network connections. There is a large range of available speeds which can go to 10 Mbps (megabits/second) or much higher, versus fax connection speeds as described above.
Transport Layer Protocols refer to the OSI model level 4 of protocols including but not limited to TCP and UDP.
Application Layer Protocols refer to the OSI model level 7 protocols including but not limited to HTTP, RTP, TFSP, FTP.
Internet Layer Protocols refer to the internet internetwork protocols including but not limited to IP, IPv4, IPv6, IPsec.
The present inventive subject matter is intended to provide a system and method of ultra high speed fax with guaranteed and secure confirmation and delivery.
One object is to re-route fax calls initiated from any fax machine, through a fax ATA adapter, over a secure internet link using Internet protocols, in order to provide a 100% guarantee that the originating facsimile image will be delivered.
Another object is to encode the first page of a fax image with a code of bits that are recognized by a software decoder program at the fax service provider or fax server recipient. The software decoder program has the capability to recognize the encoded bits in the image, and also has the capability to recognize in the T.30 header, the Non Standard Capabilities codes and Facsimile Information Field, Customer Subscriber Identification (“CSID”), and from the telecommunications system, the phone number from the originating device via Automatic Number Identification (“ANI”) or Caller Identification (“Caller ID”) and the time of the originating facsimile call. When the software decoder program recognizes such above described codes, the software confirms that the originating fax call comes from a fax ATA adapter installed and operating on the originating facsimile machine or fax server, the software application signals the fax ATA adapter with an acknowledgement. After the acknowledgement signal, the fax ATA adapter uses the T.30 fax protocol to set the transmission speed to any of the desired T.30 supported modem speeds; the object of setting the speed to a slower speed is to keep the transmission channel open while the fax program performs its other intended function.
Another object is the fax software decoder software sets up a secure link to the fax service server and notifies the fax ATA adapter of the address of the secure link. The fax ATA adapter then proceeds to transfer the bytes of the facsimile image data via any internet transport layer, application layer, or internet layer protocols to the designated web server. Encryption may or may not be used. The fax transmission is terminated after the receiving server issues a confirmation to the fax ATA adapter that the facsimile image data was received. Thus, the original fax image was sent to an accessible server at internet speeds rather than at traditional telephony speeds, and the original fax image is sent with a guarantee of delivery, whereas facsimile transmissions typically experience a 10%-30% failure rate that necessitate retrying the fax transmission a second or third time.
Another object is to reduce the telephony and computing resources used by the fax service by streaming facsimile image data to the fax server at internet speeds.
The above and other objects, features, and advantages of the embodiments of the present inventive subject matter are further described in the detailed description which follows, with reference to the drawings by way of non-limiting exemplary embodiments of the present inventive subject matter, wherein like reference numerals represent similar parts of the present inventive subject matter throughout the several views and wherein:
Although the detailed description herein contains many specifics for the purposes of illustration, anyone of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that many variations and alterations to the following details are within the scope of the embodiments described herein. Thus, the following illustrative embodiments are set forth without any loss of generality to, and without imposing limitations upon, the claimed inventive subject matter.
Referring to
The sender's fax ATA adapter 402 encodes hidden bits 308 into the fax image data, 302. If the fax call is answered by any fax service, such as a public or private service provider, or any customer owned fax system with a compatible fax decoder program 104, the service provider host 305 recognizes the embedded bits in the image 105, then the encoded bits in the fax image will be authenticated, 303 so that the receiving fax program will send a IP (internet protocol) link to the sending fax ATA adapter 106. The hidden bits also signal the software decoder program the number of bytes that are contained in the image data.
In addition, the sending fax ATA adapter may send a message to the receiving decoder program using the CSID or Non Standard Capabilities fields or Fax Information Field of the T.30 protocol to signal the decoder program to perform the functions as if there were bits encoded in the facsimile image.
Further, the fax ATA adapter has the capability to and may calculate a checksum on the facsimile image data using one or more of the number of bytes of the image data, the number of pages of the image data, a unique identifier of the image data and a unique identifier of the software encoder program. The software decoder program also has the capability and may calculate a checksum based on the same criteria such that the checksum on the same facsimile image data and same intended destination will match and may be used for future validation of the facsimile image data.
After the secure IP link 404 is received by the fax ATA adapter, the image data is then streamed via the data communications (Internet) link to the provided server address using any available Transport Layer, Application Layer, or Internet Layer Protocols, 302 in
The fax image data is thus streamed to the destination server at the service provider or network fax server at the high speed of the data communications network, 108 in
When the fax image data is streamed to the designated secure location, the software decoder program of the receiving system recognizes the completion of the transmission 110 by having the number of expected bytes received as notified by the software encoder program of the sender, and the document is considered complete 110, and received at the service provider ready to forward 111, to the final destination. The software decoder program then proceeds to send a T.30 confirmation signal 109, over the still open standard facsimile transmission link with the fax ATA adapter which terminates the call. The software encoder program at this point may inform and third party software application that the fax transaction is confirmed and complete. Note that at the time of confirmation, the image has already been received at the fax service or fax server location, and the confirmation time and date stamp are officially recorded in the facsimile transmission and serves as legal proof that the facsimile document was sent.
The present application claims the benefit of the U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61/891,341, filed on Oct 15, 2013 and entitled “System and Method for Guaranteed High Speed Fax Delivery” which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety; the U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61/927,716, filed on Jan 15, 2014 and entitled “System and Method for Guaranteed High Speed Fax Delivery” which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety; U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61/927,716, filed on Oct 15, 2013 and entitled “System and Method for Guaranteed High Speed Fax Delivery With Fax Adapter” which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 61891341 | Oct 2013 | US | |
| 61927716 | Jan 2014 | US | |
| 61891352 | Oct 2013 | US |
