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?"

Comments

Not looking very hard are you?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Locality

[toast0]

just because you have to do ten digit dialing doesn't make it non-local.

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 :)

E-mail please.

[trafik]

I just don't understand why so many people are still shackled to fax machines. Buy a scanner, scan your document, and e-mail it.

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...