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?"
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 couple inches of the speaker cone without getting echoes or feedback -- a test that commercial echo cancellers costing hundreds of dollars routinely failed. For at least a couple of years we used this as part of a demo for senior executives intended to show just how good voice-over-IP could be.
people still use fax machines? does analog-over-digital-over-internet-over-digital seem dumb to anyone else?