Slashdot Mirror


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?"

1 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Locality by toast0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 :)