QUESTION Help with Cisco SPA122 and fax

simonmason

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I have been using piaf for years - working beautifully. I got a hold of a Cisco SPA122 from work and brought it home to play around with. I factory reset it and got it working very quickly - dial tone with regular phone. I am trying to set it up to fax, outbound is all I really care about. I see that there is some discussion about T38 and setting this up. I am teaching myself how to do this so can someone provide some pointers to help me get it up and running? Thanks.
 

atsak

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Don't use an SPA122. Get an Obi 200 (or etc) and a reverse DSL filter between the fax and the Obi. T38 isn't usually required. Done this now a dozen times and every time has been OK - not the case with a few times I tried with an SPA.
 

simonmason

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Thanks for the advice. I wasn't planning to buy a device - we had this one left over at work so I thought I would bring it home and play with it. So my question remains - unless what you are telling me is that it simply will not work?
 

simonmason

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Let's assume for a second that I am a glutton for punishment. My faxing need is very low - probably once every couple of months. So I don't want to invest much in setting it up and I am fine with babysitting a fax to make sure it goes through. With all of that said, is there anything special I should do to set this up? I have it setup with just basic settings - I get a dial tone, it dials, but it is never able to negotiate at present. Thanks.
 

kenn10

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I would avoid the T38 route altogether because you have to use if from end-to-end to get reliable results and not all interconnecting carriers support it. Just make sure your outbound SIP codecs are all set to g.711 (Ulaw) and that the SPA122 extension is set to g.711 in the PBX. I find that even when babysitting my fax that it is horrible to work with. Depending on current network traffic on the internet carrier, the quality of the VOIP carrier and host of other connections, it is infuriating every time I try to fax. My machine simply will not connect with some fax servers but works fine to another traditional fax. At a different time or day, it won't connect to anything.

I scan and email almost everything now.
 

Cynjut

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I've been beat near to death by FAX machines over the past 10 years or so. I'm at the point that I don't even try - it's all Internet Faxing for me. There are plenty of good email-to-fax gateways out there that don't charge enough for me to even try to set up fax machines anymore.

To give you an idea - I advocated an online FAX service to one of my customers for two years. They dropped me because they couldn't get reliable faxing set up with their fax machine. They went to a new guy who said the same thing I did: "It'll never work reliably" and set them up with Internet faxing and charged them more money. Not going to make that mistake again.
 

atsak

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Thanks for the advice. I wasn't planning to buy a device - we had this one left over at work so I thought I would bring it home and play with it. So my question remains - unless what you are telling me is that it simply will not work?


It will work, a varying percent , usually around 90% I find; more pages less likely to work.

Play with the gain values.
Play with the RTP timer value (or something like that ) try .020 instead of .030
Try the reverse DSL filter trick
Turn off ECM on the fax machine
lower baud rate to 9600
 

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