VoIP Solution for Faxing? 50
mbathgate asks: "In the world of residential academia, cell phone proliferation is so immense that at many schools they've pulled the plug on landline long distance service, including mine. I have a cell phone, but I can't fax through it, and dialing 29 digits for every fax is a real pain (few faxes are local, especially in Los Angeles). I need a finger-saving solution, but I don't want a web or email-based service, for a number of different reasons, mostly legal and security-related (please save me the flaming - the decision is made). VoIP looks very attractive to me, though, with a 100baseTX port in my room connected to a huge pipe. Slashdot has covered switching to VoIP before, but the focus has been mostly voice calls. I've hunted around on a few different sites, but haven't come across anything which assures me that VoIP would work for my situation. I need a solution for high quality outgoing calls to landlines which can connect to my existing fax machine (RJ11 port). It must be Mac OS X compatible or OS-independent. An incoming number would be nice, since it would let me receive faxes without being there to manually press 'Receive', but considering our anal-retentive firewall policies, getting it to work outgoing would be a good start. Does Slashdot have some experience with faxing via VoIP that they'd like to share?"
Re:Better idea (Score:1)
Not looking very hard are you? (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course not, you have posted to Ask Slaskdot.
VoIP services that run 64kbps and up mostly support faxing.
VoIP Faing from modems is less reliable because modems tend to be looser with the spec / timing then hardware faxes.
A search of any VoIP forum would have turned up these results.
Can't read? (Score:5, Informative)
vonage works with FAX machines.
Re:Can't read? (Score:2)
What's so hard? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's so hard? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's so hard? (Score:2)
Re:What's so hard? (Score:2)
Re:What's so hard? (Score:1)
Re:What's so hard? (Score:2)
eFax (Score:2, Offtopic)
http://www.efax.com/ [efax.com]
Do all your faxing over the internet. Not sure about security, but I'd imagine that they've worked something out.
kiwi
Re:all web services suck at times (Score:2)
Re:eFax (Score:2)
highly obnoxious.
Locality (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, a lot of the area you might need to fax with is going to be intra-lata/zone3/local toll/whatever the hell they're calling it now, where on a typical residential line it would be more than a local call, but not go through your long distance carrier. I have no idea if you can make those calls or not, but you can give somebody a headache by asking them
quicknet.net (Score:5, Informative)
[NOTE: This is not a recommendation since I have never used their products]
You could check out:
INTERNET PHONEJACK [quicknet.net]
"With the Internet PhoneJACK, you can use your familiar telephone (including your cordless phone) to make and receive Internet phone calls. You can plug your standard analog telephone, fax machine or headset into the Internet PhoneJACK and keep your Internet phone calls private."
They appear to support linux
or on the same website:
iprint2Fax [quicknet.net]
Re:quicknet.net (Score:3, Interesting)
Not particularly relevant to the fax issue, but their echo cancellation used to be spectacularly good. When I was doing applied research work at a large phone company, we tested an early version of the hardware that we picked up at a trade show using our prototype voice-over-IP software and open-air microphones and speakers. In full-duplex mode, we could place a microphone within a cou
Re:quicknet.net (Score:1)
Really a non-issue (Score:5, Informative)
You'd be suprised how many of your so-called analog or land-line calls are being VOIPed around the Internet anyway. The company I work at (a mid-sized telecommunications carrier) uses fairly standard equipment for this-- Cisco AS5850s and 7206VXRs among other things... Its really quite transparent to the end user when the call is being transported VoIP, both for voice and for faxes.
Net2Phone does fax (once again) (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't receive faxes, and is a Windows-only client. Looks like $0.10 per page.
Voice? over IP for faxes? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously... VOIP seems like an abstraction over an abstraction... it's all data, why not go straight to the source so to speak and simply send out a fax signal directly?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Vonage or some such. (Score:2)
is probably the easiest.
Your comment about needing a finger-saving solution, but I don't want a web or email-based service, for a number of different reasons, mostly legal and security-related (please save me the flaming - the decision is made). doesn't make sense though and this isn't a flame. Unless you are hosting the opposite ends and encrypting, you still might as well just send a post card since you've thrown security out the window.
Schmooze your department secretary (Score:2)
Also, if you're faxing resumes, try your campus career center.
NO (Score:1)
V.150 Modem over IP (Score:5, Informative)
This PDF [surf-com.com] has some more info.
V.150 is useful for other things than just faxes---security systems and environmental monitoring for instance. It's going to be a whole lot easier to accomodate existing systems by implementing V.150 in the new VoIP kit rather than waiting for everything to become IP enabled.
Re:V.150 Modem over IP (Score:2)
I think that could come in handy.
E-mail please. (Score:1, Insightful)
They will come out the other end with much higher quality *and* the recipient will thank you for giving them the choice as to how to store it (i.e. store it electronically, or print-and-file).
Just a thought...
It Works (Score:2)
As opposed to finding a PC with a scanner. Discovering that the drivers and bundled software are hosed and nobody knows where the scanner software CD is. Or if it does work, it creates a huge file in some format that other programs can't read or crash when they try to read it. You finally get a scan in a file and attach it to an email message, only to discover that it gets bounced for being too big,
Re:E-mail please. (Score:2)
They will come out the other end with much higher quality *and* the recipient will thank you for giving them the choice as to how to store it (i.e. store it electronically, or print-and-file).
I did this for a while as a method of forwarding important mail to my parents while they were on vacation. The procedure usually went something like this:
1) Scan document. This usually i
Reversal (Score:2)
eFax (Score:2)
Working Solutions (Score:4, Informative)
Setup an asterisk pbx server [digium.com], and signup with any number of VoIP providers who support G.711 codecs (like Voicepulse [voicepulse.com] or their no bells service, Voicepulse Connect [voicepulse.com] service). Plug your fax machine into a TDM400p card [digium.com] from digium.
Another option, pickup a Grandstream HandyTone 286 [grandstream.com] (from here for instance [yahoo.com]) or a Sipura SPA-2000 [sipura.com] (from here for instance [pulver.com]) (SIP devices, plug a regular phone, or fax, into it) instead of the asterisk box, but it gives you less flexibility. Both devices would work with the Voicepulse services, or most any other true SIP based VoIP service.
This works, been able to fax to people over Pulver's Free World Dialup service [pulver.com] without any problems using both types of setup.
VOIP service providers (Score:1)
A handy list of VOIP service providers [voip-info.org] also check out the site for other usefull voip information.
industrial strength option (Score:1)
email a PDF (Score:2, Interesting)