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VoIP Solution for Faxing?
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?"
http://www.vonage.com/features_fax.php
vonage works with FAX machines.
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How much are you faxing? Kinkos and the equivalent will fax for about 20 cents a page... so you can do 100 pages a month for $20. If you're faxing more than that -- and I can't imagine why, these days -- why not just get a cell phone with a fax port? From your message, I assume you already have a cell phone; a $50 one time investment (these phones are pretty cheap on ebay and such; they're generally pretty old) and no additional monthly fee seems pretty good.
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[NOTE: This is not a recommendation since I have never used their products]
You could check out:
INTERNET PHONEJACK
"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
Most modern VoIP equipment automagically supports faxings. Its built into the spec for pretty much any H323 or SIP device that you are going to buy that has come out in the past few years.
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.
Doesn't receive faxes, and is a Windows-only client. Looks like $0.10 per page.
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Why would you want this? Why not use a fax emulator over normal IP...
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?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Rather than trying an over-IP option, you might want to change cellphone provider to one that allows faxing. This is probably the easiest - your phone will look to OS X like a fax modem, so it's fairly simple to send 'em.
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This PDF 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.
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Setup an asterisk pbx server, and signup with any number of VoIP providers who support G.711 codecs (like Voicepulse or their no bells service, Voicepulse Connect service). Plug your fax machine into a TDM400p card from digium.
Another option, pickup a Grandstream HandyTone 286 (from here for instance) or a Sipura SPA-2000 (from here for instance) (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 without any problems using both types of setup.