Does anyone have a fax on Vonage that works?

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 05, 2007 Posts: 1

Just reporting: I have an HP LaserJet 3055. I can receive faxes just fine but can't send at all, COMM errors every time, even after changing the baud rate, error correction and resolution.

I called Vonage (a very nice guy in Argentina) and they changed the jitter, Rx/Tx gain, and lowered the packetization. (I also had them increase the volume that the person on the other end hears. It was so quiet before. We're using a key service unit in-house to divide calls.) The voice quality has improved but I still can't send faxes.

Full disclosure, we're on a line-of-sight microwave signal off a tower 4 miles away. Wish we could get cable/dsl. These are typical numbers from the line quality tool:

Speed test statistics
---------------------
Download speed: 2748888 bps
Upload speed: 708320 bps
Quality of service: 48 %
Download test type: socket
Upload test type: socket
Maximum download pause: 117 ms
Average download pause: 4 ms
Minimum round trip time to server: 38 ms
Average round trip time to server: 47 ms

Voip test statistics
--------------------
Jitter: you --> server: 4.2 ms
Jitter: server --> you: 8.8 ms
Packet loss: you --> server: 5.2 %
Packet loss: server --> you: 2.2 %
Packet discards: 0.0 %
Packets out of order: 0.0 %
Number of supported Voip lines: 12
Estimated MOS score: 3.5

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 17, 2007 Posts: 2

I gave up after two years of messing with it. I never could get more than 4 pages to send unless it was late at night. If I was sending around 11:00pm I could get 6-8 pages max.

That is completely unacceptable. I have talked to Vonage tech so many times I lost count. I talked to Brother who said basically "good luck". I talked to HP when I tried switching machines who said the same thing.

My solution - I dumped Vonage and now have a nice copper line again. I have had it for a few days now and its been the best thing I have ever done and cant believe I waited so long. I can now send 30+ pages in 1/4 of the time and they are all crystal clear at the receiving end. Before they would have to call and ask "what is this number or this word?".

Good luck out there. I tried 4 different machines, two Brothers, a HP and a Canon. All of them laser All-in-One machines and all of them "tweaked" as much as possible. None worked...

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 22, 2006 Posts: 3

I think I have figured out what causes fax problems with Vonage. It is the quality of your internet connection. The reason I am saying that is because we don't really have problems with faxing until the quality of service goes down. I use the My Speed, speed test because it will tell you the quality of service. http://www.myspeed.com/pe/index.html

A little history:
We had cable internet. I don't know about other parts of the country, but it seems that here in North Texas, a good cable internet company doesn't exist (except when AT&T used to provide cable service before they went to Comcast and then to Time Warner). At home I went from AT&T, then moved into Charter's area, then into Cebridge's (now Suddenlink) area. At the end of summer we will have lived here a year, we got Cebridge when we moved in. We had been with Vonage for about 3 years at that point to get away from what we call "Ma Bell" at the time was SBC (South Western Bell). We paid for 7MB service on Cebridge, but we only saw that for the first week, after that, 3 MB was about all we got. Nine time out of ten the quality of service was less than 50% of course this is when we could not get a fax to go through. I would call the cable company...of course they thought....as long as the connection worked, there job was done. They acted as if they didn't understand packet loss or quality of service issues. I had this problem across the board with the cable companies that I had dealt with. We dumped Time Warner at my job for the same reason. We were down a lot of the time with Cebridge at home and Time Warner at work. I have come to the conclusion that cable companies just don't care.

At my job we moved all our phone and internet to a service called Cbeyond which is kind of the same technology as Vonage, but is geared towards businesses so you don't get some of the quirkiness that comes with Vonage....however there is a huge price difference. The Cbeyond service uses a T-1 line and all of our faxes go through on it. I think the reason is that when I do a speed test the Quality is 97% all the time. With time warner it was 40% or below. This reminded me...since I was having the same problem at home, I thought to my self, how would DSL do with my Vonage service. The problem was that I would have to go back to SBC who is now AT&T. The other problem was I have to get a POTS phone line to get DSL. So I found out that I could order a no frills, basic line for $7.00 a month which was limited to 25 out going calls per month and .08 cents per call after (for local calls only). I cannot make long distance calls on it. I am not going to use it anyway, so I don't care I just needed it to get the DSL service to my house. So we got the 3MB package for $24.99 per month, so now my AT&T bill is going to be cheaper than my Cebridge bill by $10. Get this the service is at 99% quality and this 3MB service is faster than our Cable that we were paying for 7MB but only getting 3MB. Also I got a $50 rebate for my modem (Modem cost $50) and 2 months free of service. Can't beat that. It's been working great with Vonage and we have a backup phone just in case the internet goes down.

RP