Fax cannot receive or send faxes.
Patcirck
Newbie

I have been trying to get my home business Fax machine to work for several months now and have not been able to reach anyone either at Verizon or HP (The fax machine manufacturer) who can give me a straight answer on how to fix it.  When I dial out and/or attempt to receive a fax, my machine gets a dial tone, but the call is eventually dropped.  Also, the phone line works just fine when I attach a telephone to it.

After speaking with several Tech support personnel form 1st and 2nd tier support and a few supervisors, the best guess is that my fax machine is set up to work on an analog phone line.  I am being told that because FIOS uses VOIP my fax machine may or may not work with FIOS.  OK, so the questions that no one seems to be able to answer are:  1) Does this type of fax machine never work on FIOS?  If so why doesn't anyone either at FIOS or HP seem to be able to definitively say so.  I am sure I am not the first person to ever try to connect this particular brand/model fax to FIOS.  2) Is it just not working with MY FIOS setup?  If so why isn't anyone able to fix/tweak my setup so that it DOES work?  According to HP, the answer is to have FIOS come out and revert my land line to copper, and FIOS doesn't seem willing to do that so far. 

Please help if you can! 

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Re: Fax cannot receive or send faxes.
mattheww50
Contributor - Level 2

Fios telephone service is NOT a VOIP service, and there is no reason a fax machine should not work. Normally your calls are analog only from the CO to the phone, at the CO they are converted to digital signaling and sent down the network. All that FIOS does is to move the conversion to digital from the CO to the ONT. That's the difference betwen FiOS and copper pair for telephone service.

It is possible that you or the CO have an equipment problem. It is also possible your fax machine doesn't work. My first suggestion would be to try to verify that the fax machine works. Take it a neighbors house and try to send a fax, and/or get a neighbor to send you a fax. Isolate the problem the fax machine or the phone line first. The other possiblity is that one of your fax machine settings is inappropriate. I've owned fax machines that allowed to tweak some of the characteristics, such as signal level (they didn't call it that, but that's what they did). It is possible that your fax machine is set to delivery to high a signal, and that's causing trouble. There is several thousand feet of copper wire to attenuate the signal at all any longer.

No guarantees, but it is a place to start.

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Re: Fax cannot receive or send faxes.
Patcirck
Newbie

I was trying to avoid having to take my fax to a neighbors house because it's not small.  I guess I am going to have to do that.  Also, because it is brand new and all the self tests say it is working fine.  I went through numerous different settings reconfigurations with HP support, and nothing seems to work. 

As for whether or not FIOS is VOIP, I am just going by what I was told by one of FIOS' tech support people.  It wouldn't surprise me if that info is inaccurate.  I have very low confidence in Verizon because of all the unbeleivably bad service I have gotten in the past.  Because of that I tend to believe the problem is on Verizon's end and not the fax machine.  However, I will take it to another, non-Verizon, phone line and test it.       

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Re: Fax cannot receive or send faxes.
Patcirck
Newbie
OK, so I read another post about how HP All in one's have some issues with FIOS.  So, I decided to take it back to the store and exchange it for an Epson.  Brought the Epson home, hooked it up, and everything works fine.  Now if I can only get Verizon to stop charging me for a bill that I paid over a month ago I will be happy.  Guess I'll be on the phone with billing AGAIN most of the day tomorrow. 
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