Troubleshooting and help with setting up and repairing VOIP fax.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a widely used term which is used as a communication tool to send voice signals over the Internet Protocol rather than the traditional Telephone Lines. Other commonly used synonyms for VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB). It can be used for a variety of communication purposes like voice, facsimile (or Fax) and/or voice messaging applications. These data are transferred via the internet rather than the conventional public switched telephone network (PSTN) and also proves cost effective.

Sending Fax over VoIP seems to be a task but in reality if you need a fairly reliable faxing over the internet using a VoIP connection then you just need to do a few configuration changes in your Fax machine. The concept of faxing has been around since many years and most of the protocols were written with the intent of sending these signals over traditional phone circuits using sound. Whereas in VoIP internet connections, voice is first converted into packets and then they are sent over the internet connections. The time period when data is successfully transferred to the VoIP configured fax machines may vary.

Fax machines are generally configured in such a way that if the machine determines that there is a data loss it will automatically shut down the transmission. Sometimes even with few bits of data loss you can still have a workable document in front of you. Not all fax machines are the same and in some machines, configuring the appropriate settings posses a challenge because of its complex user interface. Some newer fax machines have the capability to retransmit signal until an error free data is received. But the problem with VoIP connections is there will always be a small amount of data loss or disturbance in the signals and the data would never be sent.

The most common solution for sending a fax over VoIP connection is by slowing down the transmission speed so that most of the data gets to its destination without any problem. You would have to reduce the BAUD rate of the fax machine to 9600bps or even lower if possible. The next thing that needs to be done is to turn off or disable the ECM (error correction mode), this setting automatically retransmits signals if complete data is not received and would go on doing it until complete data is not received. In most of the fax machines it is turned ON by default. By configuring your fax machine to these basic settings you should be able to send fax over VoIP connections.