e-Fax Services
Service Description
General Service Information
e-Fax Services provide inbound and outbound fax capabilities. The services can replace traditional fax machines as well as provide individual or group fax telephone numbers for employees.
Any type of telephone service and any type of email system at an MNET customer location are compatible with e-Fax Services.
Volume-Based Rates
1. Pricing is a monthly tiered rate, based on monthly total pages of inbound and outbound fax usage.
2. Long distance is included in the monthly tier rate; it is not itemized separately.
See the Tiered Pricing section of this document for agency cost and usage explanations.
The specifics of the set-up are determined through the discovery worksheet and accompanying cutsheet. These are used to configure the fax users at the location.
Customer Number for Billing
1. OET will define a new Customer Number for e-Fax billing.
2. We encourage the customer to establish all its e-Fax usage under this single account number to maximize the number of pages used to compute the billing tier.
3. See the section on tiered billing in this document for further explanation.
4. OET provides reporting to assist customers in tracking fax usage within their agencies.
Metro Free Calling Area and Greater Minnesota Locations
1. Initially service is offered in the Metro Free Calling Area of Minnesota.
2. However, OET understands how to deploy e-Fax in Greater Minnesota locations. This may require a custom design, depending on the location.
3. e-Fax is available in Greater Minnesota by customer request at the same tiered rates.
Receive and Send
The Quick Reference Guide and User Guide for Web Access (OET documentation) provide step-by-step instructions on using e-Fax services. Additional useful information:
Inbound Fax (Receive)
1. Inbound faxes are sent to a telephone number that is matched to either an individual or a group email address.
2. The fax is received as an email whose subject is always “A fax has arrived from remote ID …” where … is either a fax server or a fax machine telephone number.
The subject will never be different – the sender of the fax has no control over the subject line.
3. Within the email, the fax itself is a .tif (image) file.
4. If a group is the recipient, the agency’s desktop support group will define the email group access. Example: five employees in work unit A will receive inbound faxes to telephone number nnn-nxx-nnnn. The employees’ email will need to be set up so that all of them have access to the destination email address’s new messages.
5. If an individual person is the recipient, no additional setup is needed from the agency desktop support group. We define the individual’s email address as matching the fax telephone number on the cutsheet.
Outbound Fax (Send)
1. The user goes to a website to send an outbound fax.
2. The application for outbound faxing is called WebUtil. The documentation provides full instructions.
3. A fax cannot be deleted or pulled back once it’s sent.
Resources and Priority – What Happens When Volume Exceeds System Capacity
1. OET manages the infrastructure to ensure adequate resources for inbound and outbound fax activity.
2. “Priority” is a designation for outbound faxes (not for inbound).
3. Priority comes into play when the number of queued outbound faxes exceeds the number of ports available (this is defined as “port contention”).
4. During port contention, all outbound faxes go into a queue. Then, based on port availability, the highest priority fax with the longest wait goes next, i.e., queue management is FIFO (first in first out) based on priority.
5. Each user’s configuration in the system has an assigned priority, as defined during discovery and documented on the cutsheet.
6. The priority settings available are High, Medium and Low.
7. The default setting is Medium for regular (individual and group) fax service. OET can change a priority setting by request.
8. e-FaxBlast (broadcast) is assigned Low priority. (A broadcast is one fax going to many recipients).
9. The queue cannot be manually manipulated.
Custom Cover Sheet
1. A default generic cover sheet is generated for outbound faxes unless a customer chooses to designate a custom cover sheet. The details of this are covered during discovery and documented on the discovery worksheet.
2. OET recommends the customer define a single custom cover sheet for the entire
organization, or alternately, cover sheets for specific divisions or workgroups that require their own for business reasons.
3. A custom cover sheet is not intended to be defined for each individual user.
4. The customer is to provide OET with a Word or Excel file for the custom cover sheet design, including logos, address, general telephone number and fax number, and other verbiage and elements as required.
5. OET will get the sheet converted into the required format for faxing.
6. OET will send a proof to the customer for approval prior to implementation.
7. After customer approval, the sheet is integrated into the service infrastructure and associated with the correct fax users.
8. The one-time charge for custom cover sheets is described in Ordering and Billing section of this document.
9. On a custom sheet, certain fields are either automatically populated by the fax application, or the sender enters appropriate to the situation.
10. The fields on the custom cover sheet are:
Field Source
Number of pages: Automatic feed
Date Automatic feed of date and time stamp
To Entered by sender
Organization Entered by sender Telephone number Entered by sender Fax number Entered by sender
From Automatic feed
Telephone number Automatic feed Fax number Automatic feed
Message Entered by sender
e-FaxBlast — Broadcast Fax
1. An e-FaxBlast broadcast is sending the same content to a group of recipients via fax, such as a brochure or announcement. Generally these are planned activities that are driven by a recipient list that’s maintained by the customer.
2. Successful broadcast fax depends on regular and thorough maintenance of the recipient list by eliminating numbers that are wrong, voice, disconnected, etc. List maintenance is a customer responsibility.
3. OET sets up e-FaxBlast users with Low priority. See the discussion in this document on Resources and Priority.
Tiered Pricing
1. Tiers are priced at seven levels, based on the consolidated page volume for inbound and outbound faxes during a month. The range of pages within each tier allows for fairly large swings in usage while staying within a tier, thus helping in the budgeting process. For example, Tier A covers 1 to 5,000 pages per month, and Tier 1 covers 15,001 to 37,500 pages per month.
2. Customer Number for billing: see discussion above in General Service Information. We require a new customer account number for e-Fax. We recommend the entire agency consolidate its billing for e-Fax in the new customer number to achieve the lowest per-page cost (see tiers below).
3. To prepare for initial discovery, OET recommends the agency gather the estimated volumes (total pages in and out) for a period of time (month, year, etc.). This will aid in understanding the agency’s cost for e-Fax.
4. During initial discovery, OET works with the customer to evaluate anticipated volume and to estimate the billing tier.
5. The billing process totals the pages for the month period and automatically bills the customer for the appropriate tier, based on usage.
6. Another pre-discovery effort is to identify which work functions/processes could benefit from individual fax telephone numbers for employees, and likewise which could benefit from a shared (group) fax number/account. Sometimes the latter may involve replacing fax
machines used in a workgroup.
7. For workgroup e-Fax service, the desktop support team within the agency may need to set up a group email address if none exists today.
8. The pricing tiers and volume ranges within the tiers are shown below.
9. If there is zero page usage in a month, then there is no tier billing for that month. However, other types of e-Fax charges apply monthly, based on the customer set-up (e.g., telephone numbers.)
10. Examining the tier table shows why we recommend consolidating the agency e-Fax service to a single billing Customer Number. The higher the overall volume, the lower the per-page cost (in general), although at some breakpoints between tiers the per-page cost increases slightly.
11.Note that the per-page unit cost is for illustrative purpose only. The billing is a single dollar amount for the appropriate tier, based on volume for the month.
e-Fax Services Tiered Pricing
Monthly Rate Page Range Per-Page Cost
(Example) Tier A: $150 1-2,000 $.0750 3,500 $.0428 5,000 $.0300 Tier B: $400 5,001 $.0799 10,000 $.0400 15,000 $.0266 Tier 1: $875 15,001 $.0583 20,000 $.0438 27,000 $.0324 37,500 $.0233 Tier 2: $1,500 37,501 $.0400 40,000 $.0375 50,000 $.0300 62,500 $.0240 Tier 3: $1,875 62,501 $.0300 70,000 $.0268 80,000 $.0234 87,500 $.0214 Tier 4: $2,000 87,501 $.0229 90,000 $.0222 100,000 $.0200 125,000 $.0160 Tier 5: $2,250 125,001 $.0180 130,000 $.0173 150,000 $.0150 162,500 + $.0138
Telephone Numbers
1. The e-Fax tiered service monthly rate includes a maximum of 200 telephone numbers that are reserved and provisioned through OET’s VoIP telephone network provider.
2. There is a monthly rate for each additional telephone number beyond the 200 numbers that come from OET’s VoIP network.
3. The monthly per-number charge is billed on the customer’s Voice invoice.
4. Ported telephone numbers (i.e., numbers that were originally centrex or business lines, and either ported to e-Fax or ported to IPT-Hosted service) are not included in the 200 numbers. In other words, a ported number to e-Fax service carries a monthly rate.
5. The current monthly rate per number is $.20 each.
Ordering and Billing
1. Customers initiate service through the COSWeb system as a WAN (Wide Area Network) request. Contact the OET Service Center at [email protected] for assistance. 2. Monthly rates are billed on the customer’s WAN invoice.
• Consult the current OET Rate Schedule to see the Description and Product Code for each tier
3. Full-month billing is always applicable on this service. There is no prorating for a partial month. The full month always begins on the first day of the month.
4. One-time charges are billed on the customer’s WAN invoice. • Initial setup charges are based on project coordination hours.
• Small changes incur miscellaneous one-time charges per the Rate Schedule.
• Custom cover sheet creation is billed one hour at the lowest hourly rate for e-Fax, per the Rate Schedule.
5. Any telephone numbers subject to billing appear on the customer’s Voice invoice:
• Consult the current OET Rate Schedule to see the Description and Product Code for e-Fax DID numbers.
Storage on OET’s Infrastructure
1. Fax images: saved for 60 days. Deleted afterwards, but can be recreated via the standard backup and restore processes.
2. Utility records: saved for over a year (approximately 390 days) after the fax image is deleted. Utility records are logs of the individual faxes, but not the images.
