[ale] Hylafax and Vonage

Jason Fritcher jkf at wolfnet.org
Wed Jan 19 23:39:11 EST 2005


Sean Kilpatrick wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 January 2005 10:18 pm, Jason Fritcher wrote:
> | Just curious, because I've read about people trying to make fax machines
> | work over voice lines, and have horrible problems. :)
>
> Now I'm confused. Fax machines, which must be nearly 40 years old by
> now, have _always_ been designed to work over POTS -- aka a voice
> telephone line.  Wireless -- that's a different matter.

Heh. Yeah, that could've been clearer. I was referring to a Vonage voice
line, and not a POTS line. On POTS, this would be a non-issue. On Vonage,
because of the latency of the internet, normal "voice" codecs will make fax
calls unusable. The "fax" lines Vonage sells are better suited to fax
transmission by adjusting settings that aren't needing for voice, like max
bandwidth usage, changing packetization rates, and enabling high quality
codecs that won't mangle fax tones as badly. Although, if you have a Cisco
ATA, putting *99 before the number will force it to switch to the more fax
friendly settings before placing the call. *shrug*

I avoid the whole issue by not attempting to fax anything over my Vonge line. :)

--
Jason Fritcher
jkf at wolfnet.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 254 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature




More information about the Ale mailing list