Faxing.

jasmin10

I have just set up my own business and was wondering if there was a way how I can receive faxes, I have looked and there are loads of freebie ones which give you an 0870 for your customer sent to but I don't think this will go down to well.

I have set up my Pc with a fax something or rather and managed to send a fax. Don't know how I am suppoed to pay to send it as it was back in MArch and never appeared on my bill. Is it free on your PC.

I'm not to bothered about sending but would like to be able to receive. Is there a free way of people sending me a fax?

Chippy_Minton

You need a dial-up modem and, although you can receive faxes on a line shared with your telephone, it's far easier to have a second phone line just for faxes: for more information on this see here. People sending you a fax would be charged for the cost of the fax call, and the cost would appear on their phone bill.

If you sent the fax using your dial-up modem, the cost would appear on your phone bill, just like any phone call.

jasmin10

Hi Chippy, thanks for your reply. Yes when I sent the fax back in March I disconnected my broadband and plugged in my phone line and dial up modem which worked. If I downloaded one of these free e fax then and got an 0870 number for my clients to fax me. would the cost be that much different to them?

Or alternatively, do you know of another way?

Fonz_2

There's plenty of people who allow you to send/receive faxes as e-mail attachments now. They essentially act as a gateway to the fax service - you send one, they fax it... you receive one, they e-mail it (all automated of course).

Efax were the first one to come up on a search..

http://home.efax.co.uk

MarkyMarkD

Most customers won't give a stuff if the fax number is 0870 as they won't understand the charging.

The amount of time it takes to send a fax is trivial in most cases, anyway.

Chippy_Minton

jasmin10 wrote: »

If I downloaded one of these free e fax then and got an 0870 number for my clients to fax me. would the cost be that much different to them?

0870 numbers are charged at BT National Rate and I believe you can earn a small portion of the charge (around 1p a minute) on incoming calls, so altogether it's more expensive than a normal call.

cledor

I believe eFax also offers local (i.e. geographical) numbers at a price, so if your customers really object to using 0870 you could opt for that. I think using 0870 for faxing is convenient enough to justify the cost, and there's always email as an alternative.

jasmin10

Right done the deed and gone with voipfone.co.uk. Sounded ok to me, but then I know nothing about voip. When Igot it I had to download two bits of software one for the phone to get it to work and something called x-lite. I don't want to use the phone and don't know what x-lite is. Do you think it needs these things to get the fax side to work? if not I guess it would be ok to uninstall them?

vaio

Most fax modems have two sockets….line & phone, plug the line into line and the phone into phone.

Then WinFax software (and others I presume) will answer all your calls, if it hears a fax tone it accepts it as a fax, if it doesn’t hear a fax tone it will make the phone ring so you can answer it. There is an add-on to winfax called talkworks which does voicemail so will act as an answer phone too

XP has some faxing ability too but how good I don’t know