Satellite VoIP Discussion Board

[King P]

Does anyone know what happened to the other Alpha products for Vonage, namely V-Fax? Going to the alpha site, now redirects to the Contact Center page (which is all but useless to me, I used V-Fax a lot though).Was there any sort of announcement about closing the other Alpha products down?Thanks!

[mlayton]

The V-Fax site has been decommissioned. I know of no plans to bring it back.

There are tons of free sites to use for online faxing though.

[King P]

Thanks for the reply. Any reputable ones that you know of?

[mlayton]

Here is the first site I see coming up in a google search...

faxzero.com

Can't say I use this kind of service, so I'm not sure what's "reputable".

[Plasticman]

If your modem in your pc is fax capable. The set up the Microsoft fax software to fax stuff.

[kustomjs]

If you want to fax from your computer make sure you do it from microsoft fax manager and make sure you force it to send it by *99 then the number.

[NetFixer]

Not necessarily so for everyone. Newer Vonage ATAs with newer firmware do not require the *99 dialing prefix (they automatically detect fax transmissions). Sending from the "fax" printer device also works with no problems for me when using the MS fax service.

I have tested both the Motorola VT2442 and the Linksys RTP300 with the current firmware, and neither required the *99 dialing prefix whether I used the voice line or the fax line for sending or receiving. I also did not find it necessary to use a dsl filter in-line with the fax modem as has often been suggested (and as I found that I had to do a couple of years ago). The only compensation I currently use is towith no error correction or handshaking limit the modem and serial port to 9600 baud (and some recent tests with my notebook's internal modem showed that probably even those limitations may not really be required since I was able to send and receive several faxes using the default modem settings).

[kustomjs]

I have the lastest firmware on the newest v-portal and if you dont use *99 it will cancel the fax. Trust me I have been with vonage with this v-portal over 2 years now and I know what going to work and not going to work.

Its best to use the *99 from msfax.

[NetFixer]

Strange that Vonage would neglect their own Vonage branded ATA in that fashion (especially since on their support pages they no longer seem to advise using *99 for fax transmission for any current ATA). The original purpose of using *99 was to set the bandwidth to maximum on early models of some Cisco/Linksys ATA devices.

Later models and later firmware releases did that automatically when a fax transmission was detected by the ATA. If you order a dedicated fax line, that line is automatically provisioned for maximum bandwidth, so even with an older ATA, the *99 would do nothing when using a dedicated fax line (or a voice line with bandwidth set to maximum bandwidth).I do not see anywhere in the OP's posts saying that the V-Portal was the ATA in use, so even if using *99 is an official undocumented requirement for that ATA, it might not apply to the OP (it certainly does not apply to my setup). A good rule of thumb is to offer advice that says "this may help", but don't assume that what works for you must be done and/or will even work for everyone else.

[habskilla]

Can a Vonage voice line also fax?