Faxing with Vonage and HP OfficeJet 6310

Posts: 27 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Sep 20, 2007 Posts: 27

Ha! color faxing over Voip ha.

Posts: 8 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 03, 2006 Posts: 8

For outbound faxing try Vonage V-Fax. Let's you fax the document via the fax web page. Goto https://v-fax.vonage.com.

Posts: 111 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Jan 26, 2008 Posts: 111

ok wrote:

Seems like Voip is turning the clock back on FAX. No ECM/ slow-sppeds was what all fax machines did 10-15 years ago. I was looking forward to color faxing Rolling Eyes

My sentiments exactly. For faxing you just can't beat copper wire. Sad, isn't it?

Posts: 47 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jun 13, 2007 Posts: 47

I think if IPFAX machine were availabble, the experience would be lot different. I am not sure why no one makes them.

Posts: 63 · Full Forum Member Joined: Nov 02, 2007 Posts: 63

MikeFarm wrote:

I've read many complaints/challenges with faxing and Vonage. I tried both setting the fax to 9600bps (slowest it will go) and dialing the *99 before the number. Neither of which worked for outbound faxing. Please help, this may force me to rip out vonage...

I have been using an HP C7250 AIO with no fax problems at all. Did your unit come with a phone cable? The set up instructions that came with my unit emphasized to use the phone cord that came with it and not substitute a regular cable. Don't know what makes the cable special but it does work so I guess I won't worry about it.

Posts: 111 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Jan 26, 2008 Posts: 111

I also saw where you are supposed to set your baud to 9600 and turn off ECM and just did it without trying to fax normally. Now I am wondering if this is an adapter issue, a Vonage network issue, or a bandwidth issue. Are there people out there who can fax normally and use color and everything over Voip?

Posts: 50 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jan 13, 2008 Posts: 50

In the event of the recent news of Comcasts shaping of Voip packets can they be messing with Vonage enough to screw up the faxing as well? Seems Comcast is not only shaping network packets to reduce the quality of other people's Voip but also to monitor what their customers are doing. Check out one of my prior posts.

http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic21874.html

Alan

Posts: 47 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jun 13, 2007 Posts: 47

Arthur_lw wrote:

I also saw where you are supposed to set your baud to 9600 and turn off ECM and just did it without trying to fax normally. Now I am wondering if this is an adapter issue, a Vonage network issue, or a bandwidth issue. Are there people out there who can fax normally and use color and everything over Voip?

I think it's combination. Based on my understanding of various speeds tests posting from users it appears that many users experience signficant jitter/gap event during fax calls. The HighSpeed/ECM etc. makes fax machines sensitive to any loss and results in fax machines aboting the call. No ECM setting results in no error correction/retransmissions although the receiving fax machines probably may be printing poor quality fax but probably not bad enough to abort the call.

Since things work well for you it would be interesting to see the speed test results

Posts: 111 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Jan 26, 2008 Posts: 111

ok wrote:

Since things work well for you it would be interesting to see the speed test results

Based on my limited use of my fax machine it seemed to work better using normal resolution but not sure about the baud rate and ECM. My son has one similiar to mine but has yet to get his working so we can exchange faxes. Mine is a Canon MP780 AIO. The only faxing I have done is with businesses that don't have anything sofisticated in the way of fax machines that can generate color documents, so mine is a bit too techy. Perhaps I just need to throttle it down and not worry about special features. Just guessing here. Faxing is going the way of the dodo bird, or so it seems, but there are those rare times when the other end insists on paper. Perhaps there are businesses that use it regularly still, but for me personally I almost never use it. But when I need it, I need it Exclamation

LOL

I've been doing some homework here and think I may have answered my own question, but I still don't understand all I know about Voip. You guys on the inside with Vonage can correct me if I'm wrong or verify my theories here.

If I go to http://www.testvoipspeed.com/index.html to check my bandwidth with their meter I see only spasdic results from my FIOS service. I guess that explains why I can get a yellow dot where the jitter number is even though I have tons of speed and QOS scores of 98%. My Kbps can go from a couple hundred all the way to infinity over a matter of a second. It's all over the place and I have to put the blame for that at Verizon's door. My fiber link has no repeaters, I don't share any splitters with the guy down the block, and my fiber goes straight to the Central office as a single straight shot. It's after that when I get out onto the 'net that I have trouble and we're talking at three in the morning, so maybe Verizon has its own bottlenecks, or who knows what?

It's frustrating, all this technology jazz. Mostly I can make lovely-sounding calls anywhere in the world. Faxing is perhaps another matter. Well except for one call to New Dehli when I talked to Vonage C/S that is. Eye Popping

LOL The gal did something when I told her that the connection was breaking up though, and maybe it was in her headset or something. Anyway she fixed it, so it may not have had anything having to do with my connection.

I noticed when I go to that site I mentioned above about the different codecs they use for Voip. And here I come to the crux of the matter and how I don't understand all the background stuff about Voip. They have a chart there explaining all the different codecs in use. OK, I can figure out that Vonage uses G.711 for its fax line and can choose from bit rates of 48, 56, and 64 Kbps. And I understand that one can select from the various bit rates with an attribute on Vonage's end. I learned this dealing with the folks who provide my Brand X Line 3. (Vonage supplies Lines 1 and 2.) Anyway, they (Brand X) were using the G.729 codec for my voice line but the tech said he could change it to G.711 and bump it up to 64Kbps with an attribute if I wanted, and I said fine, I had plenty of speed (15/15 megs).

Ok, now here's the problem. The highest bit rate is 64Kbps and I am using 9600 baud, supposedly. Now I know that baud is a fraction of bps, and I guess it is a variable relationship depending on what is being sent at any given moment in time, kinda sorta. So I guess the Voip providers say to throttle your fax down to 9600 (or lower mind you!) to accommodate the highest bit rate possible with this codec. And still guessing now, that when you go into your Vonage account and adjust your (voice) call quality slider you are not adjusting your router's QOS for your Vonage device, but rather switching codecs from G.729 to G.711 -- prolly the low 48 number. And maybe if I ever get some savvy person at tech support I will ask him or her which of the three bit rates for G.711 that I am currently using and bump it up to the max if it's a lower number.

I'm happy to attach my speed results and will do so now. It seems that the speed test here at the forum is assuming the use of a G.729 codec, since it never gives me an MOS higher than 4.1, but if I go to http://www.testyourvoip.com/ they tell me I have an MOS of 4.4 (to Boston from Dallas area actually 4.42 and to Sydney actually 4.36). But then too, it (forum test) only senses 1/2 to 2/3 of my true speed as well. (And writes underneath the side bar too. LOL)

Download speed 9938 Kbps (socket test)
Upload speed 7289 Kbps (socket test)
Quality of service 97 %
Maximum pause 28 ms
Round trip time 51 ms
Upstream jitter 2.1 ms
Upstream packet loss 0 %
Upstream packet order 100 %
Upstream discards 0 %
Downstream jitter 8.4 ms (always yellow dot here)
Downstream packet loss 0 %
Downstream packet order 100 %
Downstream discards 0 %

I should add here that my ISP has an optimizer utility at their website which I use, but one of their techs put me wise to a site where I can tweak the system even finer:
http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp

You click on the .exe file to the left of the sample dialog box and it gives you your settings and then you can hit the link at the top and see their recommendations. Use care here. It said I should have a MaxMTU of 1500, but I found I got losses if I went over 1492. Still, it recommended I set my TCP Receive Window to 1045440 where Verizon had it set at only 292200, so that may be the reason why I get no losses in the test and get good results. Well, except for jitter, but I don't think I can help that, can I?

Here's what those speeds should read:

Posts: 47 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jun 13, 2007 Posts: 47

Your speed tests results are good and probably the same is the case with most folks who have FiOS for the reasons you mention. On te topic of FoIP you can read a lot on web and understand the details.

Most fax machines that you buy today are typically high-speed or super G3 and work at 33.6Kbps. They all do ECM. The fine/superfine/standard refers to scan-resolution.

ECM (Error Correction Mode) when used results in great quality faxes. However fax machines are/were designed for PSTN where packet-loss is negligible. In case of Voip apart from packet loss there is also jitter ( this also results in packet-loss when high) and this results in fax machine re-trasmitting the lost packets and in most cases abandon the call.
When you disable ECM, there is no error recovery when a tranmitted page suffers from packet loss. It probably results in some occassional missing lines. Here too there are limits as to how many lines in error will be acceptable to fax machines before they drop the call or retrain.

There are two ways to handle fax in IP networks : Passthrough (use G711 - 64kbps) or Relay (T38). The fax problems can be resolved to large extent by using T38 or using some error correction/recover on IP network.