KeyCruncher.com

UPDATED 2009/06/21 – Read my important update

I used to be a MyFax customer and they provide a great service. I have rarely ever had problems with reliability of MyFax, but the $10 per month price was pretty high when I considered that I only receive and send a few pages a month; at that price MyFax allows you to send 100 pages and receive up to 200 incoming pages.

I have been a CallCentric user for a while now; they provide VoIP telephone service on a pay-as-you-go basis and also offer extremely reliable service. What I like most about CallCentric is the level of flexibility that they offer; you can buy only what you need to use. Additionally, CallCentric provides fax receipt capability and emails the faxes received to any email address as a PDF attachment.

CallCentric allows faxes to be received two different ways:

1. Via a rule: Call treatments allow CallCentric users to set up either a) a timeframe during which calls will automatically be routed to fax receipt b) redirect all calls from a particular number to the fax receiver c) send calls to fax when you are on a call or not registered with the SIP provider.
2. Via dedicated fax numbers: A DID (direct inward dial) phone number can be set up to receive faxes full time and this is the option I chose. In about 3 minutes, I had a local phone number dedicated to receiving faxes set up in my CallCentric account.

Using a dedicated fax number will cost me $1.95 per month, plus 1.5 cents per minute for each incoming call. Most fax machines are capable of sending faxes at a speed of up to 33.6 kbps; even if I figure that incoming faxes would only be transmitted at a fraction of that speed, 9600 baud, I could still receive about 1 page every 10 seconds.

So, I would have to receive about 3,200 pages in any given month to meet the $10 per month I was spending with MyFax. Over time, using CallCentric to receive my faxes instead will save a good deal of money.

I still need to work out how to best send outgoing faxes. One option would be to hook up my fax machine to a telephone adapter and use CallCentric. Another is to just email a scanned attachment instead. Perhaps CallCentric will offer the ability to send outgoing faxes via the web interface in a future upgrade.

Filed under: Business, SIP, Technology, VoIP / Telephone