2 FAX Machines 1 Phone Line?

[sdotbrucato]

Okay I'm not sure how this is going to sound but eff it here goes.


We're going to be doing some office reconfiguring shortly (just got the drops done) and we want to put one of the OfficeJets in the front and the other in the back. Now we have 2 phone lines, one fo fax, and the other for telecom.

Now the question, if I were to put 2 fax machines on the "fax" line, what would happen with incoming faxes? We do a lot of service work for major corporations so we do a lot of faxing back and forth.

Eventually I'd like to make this all paperless, maybe utilize the faxing service on the SBS box, but until I can get them out of the tree killing, copies of copies of copies, incase of computer crash (I'm the first IT person to be in the office, they've lost a lot of stuff do to bad backup procedures....)

 

[Ockie]

Fax machines can be configured to recieve faxes based on the rintone, you can set the ringtone depending on the number being called.

At least, this is how it worked for me in the past.


Why would you want two fax machines on one line anyways? You can only use one at a time. Why not have one fax awnser both numbers?

 

[sdotbrucato]

Well we're going to be doing some office rearranging and for ease of use, we wanted to have a fax machine at each end of the office. One in the front, one in the back.

The one in the front is the one that is used most often and is used to send/receive.
The one in the back would be used to just send.

They don't want a fax on the main line, because the phones are rather busy (which is also why I asked about a PBX solution in my other thread) and we do A LOT of faxing.

If this can't be done, its no big deal, just extra walking for the office folk. I use a virtual fax for everything I need so I really don't care lol. I'm just doing some of the leg work.

 

[valve1138]

Just set the fax in the back room not to automatically answer incoming calls. Should be easy to do.

 

[Druneau]

I've actually done this setup 5 months ago where I work.

The problem was not in receiving faxes, it was in sending. What happens is when sending from the "send only" fax, the other fax on the same line will pickup and print the fax (because it all works analog and well he picks-up the tones).

What we had to do was puchase "the stick" (http://www.faxswitch.com/stick_fax_phone_modem.html) which automatically routes the "active" line.

This allowed the setup to work perfectly and i've yet to receive complaints from co-workers.

 

[marley1]

i was gonna say, if you can get through your ISP VOIP service, why not pick up an extra line, setup rollover on the fax machines, so then do both.

 

[valve1138]

I've actually done this setup 5 months ago where I work.

The problem was not in receiving faxes, it was in sending. What happens is when sending from the "send only" fax, the other fax on the same line will pickup and print the fax (because it all works analog and well he picks-up the tones).

What we had to do was puchase "the stick" (http://www.faxswitch.com/stick_fax_phone_modem.html) which automatically routes the "active" line.

This allowed the setup to work perfectly and i've yet to receive complaints from co-workers.

The other fax wasn't able to detect if the line was available or not?

 

[Druneau]

The other fax wasn't able to detect if the line was available or not?

Fax 1 in front was setup to answer incoming calls, Fax 2 was setup to ignore incoming calls.

for receiving this works ok. This also works if you only send from Fax 1. (But then what's the point of Fax 2 if you can't use it).

When sending from Fax 2, Fax 1 is still plugged into the same line so it hears the tones from Fax 2 and sends a signal to Fax 2 to start sending the fax.

So while Fax 2 would dial, Fax 1 would answer before it could even ring at the dialed destination.

So in short : No, our particular fax machine was not able to detect line use. It might be a feature of some fax machines, but while looking for a solution I haven't stumbled upon this option.

 

[Ockie]

Well we're going to be doing some office rearranging and for ease of use, we wanted to have a fax machine at each end of the office. One in the front, one in the back.

The one in the front is the one that is used most often and is used to send/receive.
The one in the back would be used to just send.

They don't want a fax on the main line, because the phones are rather busy (which is also why I asked about a PBX solution in my other thread) and we do A LOT of faxing.

If this can't be done, its no big deal, just extra walking for the office folk. I use a virtual fax for everything I need so I really don't care lol. I'm just doing some of the leg work.

So basically, you want two faxes on a single line sharing a single number in two diffrent locations.... just so it makes it easier to walk to and it's close to fax something from.

What you could do is only set one fax to recieve, so both can send, but only one can recieve.