Serious faxing problems with Vonage

[thirdlegstump]

Been using Vonage VOIP service for awhile now and while making phone calls hasn't been very problematic, I can't send 9 out of 10 faxes without errors. That's less than a 10% success rate. Forget about multi-page faxes, they'll never go through. I'm on RR cable modem which has never given me any trouble. Occassionally when I'm talking on the phone, I'd lose signal completely and have to redial. Technical support told me to install a DSL filter which I did to no avail. I'm about to give up on this completely and get another normal phone line but that's another story with Verizon not being able to give me a dial tone because the phone box terminal is too old or some crap. Ugh.

 

[Night201]

Originally posted by: deathkoba
Been using Vonage VOIP service for awhile now and while making phone calls hasn't been very problematic, I can't send 9 out of 10 faxes without errors. That's less than a 10% success rate. Forget about multi-page faxes, they'll never go through. I'm on RR cable modem which has never given me any trouble. Occassionally when I'm talking on the phone, I'd lose signal completely and have to redial. Technical support told me to install a DSL filter which I did to no avail. I'm about to give up on this completely and get another normal phone line but that's another story with Verizon not being able to give me a dial tone because the phone box terminal is too old or some crap. Ugh.

Maybe that is your problem. Maybe you have a week signal and the other fax machine is dropping out because of that. There isn't much error correction with faxes.

 

[thirdlegstump]

Well I meant I can't fax through my VOIP service which claims to be able to fax. That line uses my cable line which is new and without trouble. I would prefer to fax over a normal phone line but that's dead as mentioned.

 

[isekii]

yea i have trouble faxing too.
I can fax single pages fine but if i do multiple pages, every page after the 1st one always fails.

 

[thirdlegstump]

This seems like the general concensus with many Vonage customers...Gonna call CS tomorrow and do a bit of bitchin.

 

[daveymark]

no faxing is the main reason I'm hesitant to go with voip

 

[gsaldivar]

My understanding of VOIP services is that they digitize and downsample analog phone signals for transmission over TCP/IP networks to save costs.

It's possible that the root of the problem lies in the fact that the downsampling of the analog audio signal is itself corrupting your fax transmissions.

Try configuring your fax machine to send at a lower speed. If it normally sends at 14.4k, try configuring it to send at 9600k. If this improves the reliability of each transmitted page, then it would suggest that the VOIP downsampling process itself is causing your problem.

As someone else suggested, you could get a separate landline for fax use. As an alternative, you could try a service like Intellifax that doesn't rely on VOIP analog-to-digital conversion to send a fax. To setup an account with Intellifax, you deposit ~$20 into an account, and your outgoing faxes are deducted from your account at a flat rate of 7 cents per minute (USA/Can) with no monthly fee.

Hope this helps!

 

[thirdlegstump]

Well the reason for having an analog fax line is because our company uses the fax machine in case email/internet is down. We actually email and fax the same exact document.

 

[gsaldivar]

Here are plenty of VOIP/FAX discussion threads that might provide useful insight.

 

[thirdlegstump]

hmmm...I've tried all the suggestions there already. It's possible that my fax machine is not compatible with voip?

"In our product testing, we have never encountered any fax machine that did not perform as it should over the Vonage network."

I smell BS.

 

[dabuddha]

One fix which I read about is using a DSL filter backwards with your fax machine. A lot of people claimed that it fixed their faxing problems.