How to use a fax machine in a room without phone line support?
Fax and VoIP are not happily married, yet. Your best bet is to use the fax machine as a pure scanner, then get an efax.com account as nomisxid suggests. OTOH if you’re happy to bypass VoIP for fax purposes, just hang a standard fax modem off your server (just about any 56K dialup modem will be a fax modem too), wired directly to the phone line, and redirect your faxes through that. You’d still use your existing fax machine’s scanner, so faxing would become a two-step process involving separate scan and print steps run from your computer, but that should be marginally less of a PITA than hauling the whole thing upstairs. There are wireless phone sockets available that are supposed to let you do wireless links between a standard phone and a standard phone socket elsewhere, but I would be surprised if they worked well for fax. If you can find a cheap one, though, it might be worth trying out.
I use an efax-like service and I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone else. The service is fine for incoming faxes but isn’t so great for outgoing. If vonage is your only phone service, I don’t believe you have any other options. If you are using a regular phone line for faxing, you can get one of those contraptions that “turn any outlet into a phone jack” but that won’t work with vonage. Is it out of the question to leave the printer/fax in the server room and just send stuff to be printed there and fax from that location?
I use FaxItNice.com‘s send-only account to send faxes over the Internet. It’s great and no contract is required.
