Switch Connect T.38 FAX hosted SBC and telephony service

Switch Connect T.38 Fax service with BNS Group's Cloud Fax Server 

Switch Connect delivers market-leading secure communication solutions that power leading solutions providers and partners to deliver enterprise communication solutions to their customers.

As customers move more work loads to the cloud, replace traditional PBX systems with Microsoft Teams calling, legacy fax for some industries must still be supported.   This service provides the necessary hosted session border controllers (SBC) and telephony to correctly support enterprise fax.     

A combination of BNS's fax server in cloud (eg: AzureAWS) communicating T.38 to Switch Connect's T.38 hosted telephony service, provides connectivity to the PSTN with high availability for enterprise customers.

Switch Connect's T.38 service provides reliable T.38 to G711au transcoding services using industry leading SBCs from Ribbon Communications.   

BNS Group's 25+ year experience with enterprise faxing and Switch Connect's telephony and hosted Teams calling capabilities combines to make the solution ideal for customers migrating their fax work loads from traditional on-premises PBXSBCISDNSIP Trunks to a pure cloud play for faxing.  

Benefits of the solution include:

• No on-premises fax hardware
• No on-premises phone lines for fax
• Hosted session border controllers with high availability to the PSTN for reliable faxing
• No faxes are stored in Switch Connect because they only provide T.38 switching onto the PSTN
• Faxes are stored on your AzureAWS cloud based fax server because communications is end to end from the fax server in your cloud tenancy to a fax device on the PSTN
• Integration with Office 365 using the latest Graph API and SMTPTLS for secure delivery to Office 365 mailboxes and groups. 
• Ideal for Government, Finance and Banking, insurance, healthcare or any industry requiring security and compliance with privacy laws.      

For more information about Switch Connect https://www.switchconnect.com.au  

Cloud Fax Server design overview 

Note: The solution can be used in: AWS, your own Datacentre, Azure or anywhere else. 

Example showing Microsoft Azure.

When Windows Server is deployed in Microsoft Azure from the Marketplace it comes pre-configured with a public IP address and an internal IP address.

This documentation refers to such a deployment of Windows Server and msXfax in terms of the basic Azure firewall considerations.  Customers with their own firewalls can follow the same principles of operation for NAT traversal.   

Assumptions:

1. For documentation purposes, your deployment is a Windows Server from Azure marketplace.  

2. The minimum fax server license is 10 fax channels.  10 channels is the minimum Switch Connect service provided for enterprise customers.

3. BNS professional services is required to work with your IT team to install the fax server in Azure.   

4. A single fax server is documented in this design example.  Multiple fax servers can be configured in your design.     

FAX02 is the name of the Windows Server VM in this documentation.

Note the following VM sizes may not be sufficient if your SOE requires more software onto the server such as: 3rd party anti-virus, management agents etc. 

BNS has tested the following in Azure:

• A 10 channel fax server requires a Standard D2s V3 (2 vcpus, 8 GiB memory Windows Server VM selection from the marketplace.  
• Over 20 channels to 60 channels requires a Standard F4s_v2 (4 vcpus, 8 GiB memory) Windows Server VM selection from the marketplace.  

Design example:

Windows Azure firewall example settings