No, the ATA will connect to the IP network at a remote site and contact a Gatekeeper at a central location. So , eventho I will be switching between two different CODECS (711 & 729) for voice and FAX, the remote sites will not need a DSP to do this ?

You will then need a DSP on the closest router for the transcoding function.

Then you will find that fax may not work at all with G.729, and you will need fax relay.

Are you alone in doing this? The people that designed the network initially should know about all these issues.

That confirms my suspicion that every remote router will need a DSP for transcoding the FAX to 711. I have read that the Cisco ATA186 does NOT support fax relay and that I will need to configure this as a "fax pass-through". My H323 voice traffic will use 729 codec and the fax pass-through will negotiate 711 codec. Can anyone confirm this for me before I attempt to roll this out ? Thanks !!

You do not need a DSP for pass-through. In fact, from my understanding you do not need transcoding at all.

Ok. Would I need to configure every remote site with a fax for the fax pass-through, or only the one Gatekeeper site ?

Just configure the ATA for G.711, and let the GK be ok with that.

Note, G.711 on a WAN does not imply that fax will work 100%.

First, you only need transcoding if the two end devices cannot negoitiate the same codec or if you want to use a specific codec (say, over a low-bandwidth WAN link) that the endpoints do not support. As long as you configure the H323 gateway to support 711 (even if it prefers 729), you do not need to xcode.

The difference between Fax Relay and Fax Pass-through, as I understand it, is that Fax Relay interprets the fax signals, passes through the IP network digitally, and regenerates it on the far end, whereas Fax Pass-through simply encodes the analog signal as it would if it were voice. When you configure Fax Pass-through, all you are really doing is disabling any fax recoginition on the line so that the router does not use some other transport protocol that is designed for fax. So you only need to configure it on the site that will first receive the fax call from the analog port.