Fax

Outbound FAX

Faxes can be easily sent using our API with full status reporting. Multiple recipients can be provided for a single job, as well as a priority or a future transmission date.

Transmission Process

• Faxes are submitted via an API command. Multiple recipients can be submitted. The response will indicate success and, if so, provide a unique ID for each recipient.
• Immediately, or at the future date specified, faxes will begin to be released to the fax servers. This will be on the basis of the priority set and the date of submission. Note, in the event of multiple faxes to the same recipient, we will only send them one at a time regardless of spare capacity. For each fax released to the queue we will post a '1 Queued' status. Please see the status reporting information for details.
• Once a fax server begins work on the job, you will receive a '5 Processing' status for that job. The first stage of this process is conversion of the document to a transmittable form, this will take a short time and is naturally longer for larger documents. Following conversion the transmission will begin.
• In the event of a problem sending the fax, we will intelligently retry. This not only means redialling in the event of a busy or human answering, but also determining how many pages were successfully transmitted and just sending the rest in the event of a failure mid-call.  This differs significantly to most services where you will be notified of the problem but not offered a solution. At the end of either successful transmission or an error not overcome by our retries you will receive a final status post. This will be '10 Ok' if all was fine or a number greater than 10 if not.

Full information, including examples of requests and status updates, can be found in our API documentation

Charges 

You will be charged for the total number of seconds involved in the transmission (as confirmed in the final status report) which will be the sum of all attempts made to sent the call. This will be billed at your standard wholesale account rate with a premium on the per-minute rate for providing the fax service. Note, this is a premium to the per-minute rate and is not a connection charge or a cost per page, i.e. if your fax takes less than a minute to send you will pay a proportion of this only.

This premium recompenses us for the investment in hardware and licenses to operate fax on the Simwood network whilst leaving significant scope for our customers to add value and make a healthy return. The different charges by priority enable us to balance the needs of both quality and cost conscious customers, with network capacity. We expect the majority of faxes to be submitted with standard priority, volume users to send low priority faxes (perhaps scheduled off-peak to capitalise on off-peak call rates), leaving reserved capacity for urgent faxes where we would expect customers to be charging a premium to their end user.

Naturally, we will send your fax jobs at the highest speeds mutually supported.

The latest rates can always be found at https://simwood.com/rates

Cover pages etc.

Our goal here was to deliver a robust, high performance fax service in the cloud for a wholesale audience. As such we have kept value-added features out, in return for leaving out page based and subscription based retail pricing.

The service has been designed to take care of the mechanics of fax transmission in a scalable and extensible way; our expectation is that customers will build solutions bespoke to their customer base which may include cover page generation, email-to-fax integration etc. We have no intention to offer such add-ons.   

Inbound Fax

Faxes can be received on all of our voice numbers. There is no charge for fax receipt with messages relayed either by email (Fax-to-eMail) or by HTTP POST to your system. Each individual number's fax settings can be configured independently via the API.

Inbound fax service on a number replaces inbound voice, numbers cannot auto-detect whether a call is for fax or voice.