Network Fax
charter-ietf-netfax-01

The Network Fax Working Group is chartered to explore issues
involved with the transmission and receipt of facsimilies across TCP/IP
networks and to develop recommended standards for facsimile
transmission across the Internet. The Group is also intended to serve
as a coordinating forum for people doing experimentation in this area
to attempt to maximize the possibility for interoperability among
network fax projects.

Among the issues that need to be resolved are what actual
protocol(s) will be used to do the actual data transmission
between hosts, architectural models for the integration of fax
machines into the existing internet, what types of data encoding
should be supported, how IP host address to phone number conversion
should be done and associated issues of routing, and development of a
gateway system that will allow existing Group 3 and Group 4 fax
machines to operate in a network environment.

It is expected that the output of the Working Group will be one
or more RFC's documenting recommended solutions to the above questions
and possibly also describing some actual implementations. The life of
the Working Group is expected to be 18-24 months.

It is also hoped that some fax vendors, as well as the
networking community and fax gateway developers, will be brought into
the effort.