With the popularity and penetration of the Internet, home and business communications are gradually being converted to Internet-based applications. Internet protocol (IP) telephony is becoming a reality. As a result, voices, faxes, and texts are all transmitted using IP. A traditional telecommunication maintenance engineer has to learn how this new landscape works. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the relevant technologies involved. Hanes and Salgueiro claim that this book is “the only resource you will ever need for handling fax, modem, and text communications in IP telephony environments”; this seems to be an overstatement.

This book contains four parts. Part 1 lays the groundwork by introducing how modem, fax, or text telephony works. Part 2 explains how voices, faxes, and texts sent by corresponding equipment can be transported by the IP networks. This part also elaborates on the design guidelines for the related systems. Part 3 teaches readers how to configure the various systems. Finally, Part 4 is about troubleshooting.

The first two parts are general introductions, which are very meticulous. The last two parts are unfortunately too Cisco specific. (It is no wonder, since Cisco Press is the publisher.) It will render the book less useful if your company does not use Cisco equipment.

To understand this book, the reader must be already familiar with general communication networks. Some of the technical information may be too detailed, while some is only explained briefly. In addition, many screen shots are not clear enough (for example, Figure 12-15). Finally, I would have appreciated a glossary of all the acronyms used or, at least, a more complete index.