Who says T.38 real-time fax is dead? According to Google quite a few. Well, according to AudioCodes' Alan Percy, you people are wrong! Wrong I say! Not that T.38 doesn't have its share of issues of course. I just read Rich Tehrani's post where he quoted Alan Percy's shock at how many people attended his Fax - SIP+T.38 to the Rescue webinar hosted by TMC. It was 160 people! I've attended a few webinars in my day and never ever have I seen 160 attendees. What gives?

Alan emailed TMC the following:

After yesterday's webinar on fax, I'm overwhelmed. 

When we were developing the plans and presentation materials for yesterdays webinar titled "Fax - SIP+T.38 to the Rescue", our expectations were that a few "fax gurus" would join in and we would have a small very focused 20 - 30 person session on a rather deep dark secret of the industry.  Can you imagine my surprise when during the first few minutes of the session the participant count kept climbing and climbing to over 160 people!  Talk about standing room only. 

After 45 minutes of presentation and another almost 30 minutes of Q/A, I was toast.  There were some fantastic questions that I was able to address, but because of time limitations, we were unable to get to dozens more great questions.

The session moderator, Erik Linask published a great summary of the webinar.

What does this mean?  It can mean only one thing - there is serious pain in the VoIP industry when it comes to delivering reliable fax services and people are looking for solutions

According to Rich, on the webinar, Percy discussed reliability concerns with the G.711 standard, and more specifically, how SIP and T.38 can improve fax reliability, as well as how to eliminate expensive dedicated fax boards from communications system. Another area of focus was sending legacy TDM fax over SIP trunks.

Rich provides some analysis on "what" this whopping 160 attendance webinar "means" that is worth checking out. I'll just add that there is indeed a need for education on T.38 needed in the industry. Fortunately, TMC has been doing education in telephony for over 25 years so we not only know how to bring the greatest minds together to 'teach' but we also have built and maintained our contact "leads" database over the years. Without that database of relevant attendees, Alan wouldn't have had such great attendance.

Just as importantly, TMC's marketing team does a great job promoting TMC's webinars to bring people to these hosted educational events. So I tip my hat to my fellow mates down the hall!