Femail® 2000 LCR Service

Reduce your communications costs while enhancing performance and security in WAN environments.

What is Least Cost Routing
Much attention has recently been given to Least Cost Routing (LCR) implementations for fax servers in large organisations with many locations - and with good reason. Studies indicate that most corporations with geographically diverse sites do not realise the variety of options available that can help them significantly reduce their fax communications costs.

One of the disadvantages of faxing compared to email is the fact that long-distance fax calls cost money. As a result of this for a medium to large-sized corporation, the cost of sending faxes even between corporate sites can be a significant portion of that company's telecom budget.
This is where LCR over the Internet comes in. While more classical LCR techniques for fax calls have been available for quite a while, LCR via IP can do much more. Not only can it reduce fax costs for fax traffic between two corporate sites, more importantly it will reduce your total international fax costs. This is accomplished by sending faxes in IP packet form instead of using a normal long-distance phone call.
LCR over IP can be done by converting the fax transmission into an outgoing fax call at the remote fax server in the recipient's local dialling area. Thus, the delivery of the fax document would not require a long-distance call to deliver the fax; the fax would be delivered at local costs to the recipient's fax machine.

The Femail®2000 LCR Service
For companies that have multiple sites this IP based LCR technique can be implemented with Femail® 2000 today and results in considerable cost savings.

With the Femail® 2000 LCR Service an organisation that has multiple Femail® 2000 servers installed in multiple locations can simply have messages which originate from user desktops or networked applications routed to alternate servers via WAN or the Internet to ensure the message is sent by the best location, saving money, time and sharing workloads. The concept behind it is that the preparation of the message (e.g. generation of a fax cover page, conversion of the content, etc.) is done on the local site after which the message is transferred to the remote site, where the actual fax transmission can take place at local costs.

Some specific features
Next to its basic IP based LCR functionality the Femail®2000 Least Cost Routing service offers many additional features:

• Extended security: The service ensures data integrity and privacy by encrypting all messages before they are transferred over the IP connection.
• Central Management: The complete LCR configuration can be set up on one site and then be synchronised between sites, hereby reducing administration complexity and costs.
• Support for Intra-company traffic: It enables you to bypass the public switched telephone network (PSTN) for so called ‘Intra-company’ traffic via LCR. Thus when sending a fax between two corporate sites, fax call costs can be virtually eliminated. An outbound fax routed from site A can be routed to site B as an inbound fax to be delivered to a user on the server in site B without being transmitted over a public phone line.
• Not limited to fax traffic: Femail® 2000 LCR can be used to handle all types of traffic supported by Femail® 2000. Hence next to fax it can be used for other global switched telephone network style traffic, for example mobile phone text messages (SMS).
• Handling of inbound traffic: Next to sending outgoing messages via LCR it can also be used for handling incoming traffic. There are two common ways in which routing of incoming messages can be set up in combination with LCR.
  A peer configuration. In this set-up the sites act as peers (equals) on the level of routing incoming traffic. Each site performs its own incoming routing.
  A Headquarter – Branch office configuration. In this set-up the Branch office site will delegate the routing of incoming messages to its Headquarter site. This allows a company to centralise its inbound routing of messages in one location.