Digium Adds PSTN Faxing Support to Open Source Asterisk

Fresh off their announcement of revamped, comprehensive support package offerings for open source Asterisk, Digium today has released Fax for Asterisk .

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—April 6, 2009—Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, today announced Fax For Asterisk, a complete, cost-effective platform for the development of fax solutions. The offering provides Asterisk users and integrators a suite of user-friendly applications and a licensed version of the industry-leading fax modem software from Commetrex. To meet the demanding requirements of business users, Fax For Asterisk provides reliable faxing across the Internet and public switched telephone network (PSTN).

Asterisk is the most widely used open source telephony platform. The software is available free of charge and has been downloaded millions of times for use by individual developers and systems integrators creating custom telephony solutions for businesses. Asterisk is also available as the professional-grade and commercially supported Asterisk Business Edition.

“Asterisk users, developers and integrators now have a toolkit allowing them to integrate fax with their phone systems,” said Bill Miller, vice president of product management at Digium. “With Fax For Asterisk, Digium offers a reliable and fully supported fax solution.”

Fax For Asterisk interoperates with standards-compliant fax machines connected to Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6 on x86 Linux systems. It provides low-speed PSTN faxing via DAHDI-compatible telephony interface cards as well as VoIP faxing to T.38-compatible SIP end points and service providers. Fax For Asterisk operates at speeds up to 14.4kbps and supports V.17, V.27 and V.29 fax modems.

Fax For Asterisk is available free of charge from the Digium webstore at http://store.digium.com/ for one concurrent fax session. Multi-session licenses are available for a one-time fee of $38.50 per channel. Fax For Asterisk is available immediately. Fax capabilities for Digium’s Switchvox IP PBX were announced in February of this year and are based on this solution. For more details, visit www.digium.com.

Fax solutions for Asterisk are not new (Hylafax, SpanDSP, etc) but direct support from Digium for faxing is, and this plugs another hole in open source Asterisk making it an even more compelling option that has the Shoretel’s of the world looking in their rearview mirror.