ok us small buisness people up here in north east scotland are lookin to get rid of ye ole fax machine! ist it possible to run a phone line for incommin and out going calls, broadband for the computer, and receive and send faxes through the pc all on one line or do we still need two phone lines?

OR!! is it worth havin faxes anymore, could we do away with them an just use e-mails for everything?
We still receive a few faxes in a day and send some too but could we tell people not to bother just send e-mails! or is faxes a necessity? it's the two buisness lines thats the worst, we've had it for a while now but no internet access but now we need internet for the books and such and was interested if we could get shot of the fax line?

Any one?

i'd keep the fax tbh. even big companies like RBS still use fax a LOT more than email! maybe put the phone and fax on the same line?

I used to use this for incoming faxes. http://home.efax.com/s/r/uk_home?CMP=OTC-uk
People would send me a fax on an 0870 number and I would receive it as an email at no cost to me. If I needed to fax I would send a document to a fax via the pc. The facility is there in word etc. Just conect the pc to a phone line. You can still use the broadband for emails as the fax is using the phone side of the line. However I don't use the fax facility at all now.

In the office we still have fax now from a brother all in one machine sharing a line with our ADSL and burgler alarm!

Fax still useful on occasions particularly communicating with some foreign companies. current system allows us to "print" the fax from any computer on the internal network and theoretically receive them digitally to a computer however as we don't know who they are for we still let the machine print them.

We are shortly moving to Virgin for office broadband,this will give us another free phoneline so we will probably migrate our fax number to that line and it will cost about the same as we are paying for th BT phone on its own!

caber

One word about Virgin Broadband - don't

Ok that was 2

There system is currently overloaded in certain areas and the rumor is that they have opted not to upgrade.


Allegedly, IMO, don't sue me etc. etc.

Can't speak for your area, but the service in Swansea is crap.

On the mac the machine can act as a fax - to send one its just a printer destination. If you set it up to receive them, you specify how may rangs before it 'picks up' the phone. This is a problem if your phone and fax are on one line (as it is for me) as I have to know in advance a fax is coming so I know not to answer the phone and to disable the answering machine!
I'm sure a windoze machine can be set up the same way, with the same problem if you share a line.

I use the phone line for calls / broadband and outgoing fax and for incoming fax i use a company called business serve who for a one off £25 give me an 0870 fax number and the faxes are then emailed to me (this is an attempt to get dinosaurs to stop sending me faxes and use email as they think it cost a fortune to dial 0870)

the 0870 number could be the way to go, I could have call's and broadband comin in on one line and the faxes going straight to e-mail. this would also save us having the computer on all day for faxes comin thru we could just login when we can to check any faxes worth printing. so we'd just have to pay for the one line and broadband instead of 2 lines and broadband
sound logical but ! how easy/ reliable is it going to be?

I (ie my company) can set you up a 'virtual fax' number. Any UK area code you wish, so it looks much more professional than these dodgy 0870 ones, and faxes get sent to you via email.

Cost is £60/year one-off, recieve as many faxes as you like for no extra cost.

Chris

sounds interesting, I'm in the middle of gettin a new dell at the mo so once it's up and running with som broadband I can get back with more details and such

FINALLY got the broadband in from tiscali took an age!
The deal you do with the internet fax thingy chris is there any way of keeping the same number we have now or will it be a new number?

If you use Plusnet as an ISP you get a free dedicated fax to email phone number, incomming faxes come in as emails.

For out going faxes you can use a standard modem with WinFaxPro, or fax machine or a combined printer/scanner/fax