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Re: [hylafax-users] Foip with Hylafax

Scott Jones wrote:
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Brian Postow <brian.postow@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 30, 2010, at 2:13 PM, Scott Jones wrote:

I am a small business owner. It's just me and occasionally my wife,
doing faxing.

I do not have any copper wired telephone lines. Everything I use to
connect out is over the coax from Comcast. I would like to know if
Hylafax offers any solutions in FOIP terms for me, similar to that
offered by efax.com or smartfax, or others? I want to send and receive
via email, i.e., not using any modem.
It depends on who's listening on the other end.

If you have a voip provider that can deal with T38, then you may want to look into T38Modem. (https://sourceforge.net/projects/t38modem/)

Who's on the other end? Various non-technical folks, insurance
companies, banks, businesses, governmental agencies, small business
operators who just want to conduct business, not wanting to get
technical and worry about who is faxing them.

That's not what Brian was saying. He was saying that faxing over IP depends on who your VoIP provider is. If your VoIP provider supports T.38 (FoIP) then you may want to look into using it for fax.

That said, it sounds like your objective of "just conduct business" conflicts a bit with the realities of trying to send faxes over VoIP (or even FoIP). If you really, truly just want to conduct business and let everyone forget about the technical aspects of it, then you'll want to get an analog POTS line and connect that to a dependable fax modem and be done with it. This way you'll not have to explain to your customers the the reasons why your cheaply-sent FoIP/VoIP fax didn't get to them and why you can't fax to them because you're completely dependent on some other fax gateway or voice gateway to be "better".

I currently have an
account with efax.com, paying $16.xx per month, plus $0.10 per page
for outgoing faxes.

If all you're trying to do is cut costs then I'm sure you can find someone that charges less. But in any of these scenarios you're going to depend on them being reliable, and if they're not, then you're going to be explaining things to those intended fax recipients.

I'd just like to find a less expensive solution than I currently have
with efax.com's offering.

Then shop around. For the amount of your time (which I assume is valuable) you're going to spend trying to deal with VoIP problems or trouble with t38modem or T.38 incompatibilities or poor FoIP service you'll spend much, much more than if you just stick with what you've got or find a competent but less-expensive competitor.

I see on the hylafax web site that if I am a
big corporation with a huge fax budget I can get an application that
will route faxes over the company pipeline to the internet, without
using any copper from the baby bells.

It would help if you cited the URL so that we could explain what you've read.

I want the same thing in a
home/small business user format. Does such exist is all I want to
know? Or, is the current price I pay the bottom line for efax or
smartfax or whatever company to offer the fax routing service I
desire?

The intended fax recipients will in large part have their fax machines and fax servers connected to the PSTN and not to the internet. So no matter how you cut it you're going to have to pay someone to get your call onto the PSTN. Whether you, yourself, have an analog line or whether you pay a FoIP provider for gatewaying services, or whether you pay a web-hosted proxy to do it, all of these scenarios are going to cost you something. You can't just send a fax over the internet to the receiver when the receiver is connected to the PSTN.

Thanks,

Lee.


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