Saturday, November 04, 2006

Faxing through Vonage

I've got Vonage VoIP phone service (love it). Occasionally, I need to send a fax (maybe 2 or 3 times a year). It's not often enough to sign up for the dedicated Vonage fax line or one of those fax-through-email services, but often enough that I don't want to be paying a buck a page at Kinko's.

I've read horror stories about people having trouble faxing through Vonage (since VoIP lines are not meant for faxing, or even standard modem communication, for that matter).

I was able to get things working on this end using my US Robotics 56K fax modem and the Windows XP fax service (built-in to XP). I had to crank the baud rate on my modem down to 9600 (and I've read of people going even lower). Also, I dialed the *99 prefix to guarantee the highest quality call through Vonage.

I'm on page 7 of an 11 page document, and it's sending just fine so far...

(Note: It would not send at 56K or before I dialed *99. It kept dying with a "fatal error").

Update: Success! 11 pages sent successfully.

The TiVo modem is also still dialing fine, since I hooked it up to a wireless modem jack.

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