V-Phone and sending Fax using a V-Phone

Posts: 10 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jul 07, 2006 Posts: 10

I just upgraded my Vonage service with the new V-Phone!

I absolutely love it! It's not like the Softphone from Vonage that really sucked, if you were checking your emails or doing file transfers and the voice would break. With this V-Phone it doesn't matter.... just a another phone like performance, and I LOVE IT.

However, I use WinFax Pro (every now and then) to receive and send Faxes. With the traditional phone all I did was unplug the line and connected to my Modem in the computer and would receive and/or send a Fax.

How do I do that with the V-Phone. I have looked at every option to add the USB V-Phone to the dame modem but I can't figure this out. If I could do this then I believe it would a complete and full service that one can expect from a general phone.

Vonage, wants to ding you for $9.99 per month my selling you another phone line and I don't want a another phone line. I use the Faxing things once in a while so can't justify a new line for it.

If any one has answers to this, I would love to hear about it. I am sure there are few more people like me out there who would be interested to know the same. Thanks.

Posts: 1424 · Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 10:08 am Post subject:

I am hoping that you get an answer to this. I suspect that it is currently not a capability of the Vonage Talk application.

Hopefully it can be added in the future. It would be nice if the VonageTalk application installed a virtual phone port or a 'print to fax' printer so that you can use any program with it, but the only SoftPhone I have seen with fax capabilities required that you use it to send and receive faxes. This means preformatting all of your faxes with header sheets in tif format.

There is one workaround that I can see in your situation. That would be to build/buy a cable that would split your headphone connection and wire it to your modem. Since the [voltages, impedance, ohms or whatever the heck else is used)] are different you are going to need someone who has a working knowledge of electronics to build this for you. Then you would need to dial the number via Vonage Talk and manually send your faxes. Similarly on an incoming fax you would have to pick up the phone via the Vonage Talk client and then manually receive the fax.

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 12:32 pm Post subject:

scerruti wrote:

There is one workaround that I can see in your situation. That would be to build/buy a cable that would split your headphone connection and wire it to your modem. Since the [voltages, impedance, ohms or whatever the heck else is used)] are different you are going to need someone who has a working knowledge of electronics to build this for you.

This is no simple feat. Keep in mind that you're going from a 4-wire setup (2 for the mic, 2 for the earpiece) to a 2-wire situation (phone line.) If you try to just put these 4 wires into 2 wires, you're going to create a feedback loop. For something like this, you'd need something like a telephone hybrid. I use telephone hybrids in broadcasting all the time, even use them with Vonage. They're not simple devices by any means. Even if you did have one of these, I'm not entirely sure that it'd work with that device, as it's expecting a regular phone line at the other end. Some of the hybrids can be modified to run on "dry loops" which is what you'd have between it and the fax modem, but I'm not sure the fax modem wouldn know what to do with a dry loop.