no dial tone for PC fax/modem

Posts: 4777 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: Aug 30, 2005 Posts: 4777

Randyboy, you might be interested in this thread over in the Voip forum. Is it conceivable that reversed polarity is causing problems with your fax system?

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 21, 2006 Posts: 4

Great tid bit of info Steve. I wonder if their latest firware upgrade addressed this issue and is why all of a sudden my modem(s) can't hook up with the phone adapter.

Got some testing to do.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 26, 2007 Posts: 1

hakujin wrote:

"As far as I can tell, the only thing that was ultimately accomplished was that poor user hakujin is still without an answer to his question. And it would appear that he will remain that way, as methinks that no one is willing to try again - at least not in this thread!"

The OP was randyboy (not me) but yes, I'd love to know a solution for this as this problem is bugging me. Smile

I too have struggled with this issue this very evening (a year
later). I have a couple IBM laptops with various (e.g. Agere)
modems that will not find a dialtone when attempting to fax nor,
btw, to do dialup (as a test of the modem). They do work
fine on POTS lines.

Per the FAQ I also reduced port speed to 9600 (which should
be irrelevant) and disabled wait for dialtone. No calls show up
in the Vonage dashboard, so it really is not taking the line
off-hook. Has anyone ever figured this out?

Posts: 4777 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: Aug 30, 2005 Posts: 4777

Not that I've heard. If you're using house wiring, I'd still be interested in the possibility that reverse polarity is the issue.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 25, 2007 Posts: 1

I have several modems I'm attempting to use. I've found that Motorola sm56 internal modems work. Lucent (A.K.A. Agere) Winmodems will dial if the wait for dial tone is disabled but the handshake seems to be the problem. Does anyone know if there is an AT command that can be sent to the modem to force the handshake? Alternatively, does anyone know of different modems that work? I am going to test further with other Motorola modems that use different drivers to see if they work. I will post results.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: May 14, 2013 Posts: 1

I found on this solution on another site and it worked for me. I had to switch to using a 2-pin phone wire with the fax machine. The standard 4-pin wire worked fine on the phone, it just wouldn't give me a dial tone on my fax machine.

For those of you who aren't sure what to look for - you can easily tell if the phone line has 2 or 4 wires at the connection point - the plug will be the same size but you will see only two wires coming out of the wire casing and connecting to 2 of the metal connectors in the plug instead of all 4 slots being used.