Online Fax Service

I've been using TrustFax ( http://www.trustfax.com/ ) for the past few months with no issues. I didn't opt for a local number (don't think they offer them for 340, found out Vonage doesn't either but that's a different topic) as I wanted a number for the area code of our house back in Washington state. TrustFax does have tollfree numbers available for your fax service though.

Couldn't you just scan it and send it as a PDF?

Novnut, it's true that you can scan everything and, frankly, that's the way I prefer to do business. However, most of my suppliers still have last century technology. GoodToGo, for similar reasons, my suppliers won't spend the extra nickle to fax something that's not a free call. I'm just not sure of the toll free number would actually work here. It seems that some of the toll free numbers I call are blocked. So some toll free numbers seem to restricted to the lower 48.

Since you mentioned some 800 numbers block lines --

I know an enormous international corporation based in the states that blocks outgoing calls to the Caribbean, supposedly because they've experienced theft of services somewhere along the phone line. Outgoing calls are blocked on the 800 numbers, tie lines, as well as numbers with regular area codes. I've heard that this corporation exercises the same phone blocks in Africa for the same reason. In my frustration I did some research and was told that ultimately it was a matter of lax law enforcement and punishment, and that if Caribbean and African nations were unable or unwilling to root out offenders and hold them accountable for such theft, this corporation would protect its interests and limit its exposure in these places. This made perfect sense to me given the difficulties local law enforcement has with even simple basics. That said, I hope you find an 800 # for less that the $80/month you're currently paying.

It was even worse when we had the old area code--809--because we shared it with PR and other islands as well.

Is this corporation American? I'd like to hear about a sizeable American corporation blocking calls here...that would get my ire up bad.

American, household name, Forbes top twenty. Years ago no phone calls and faxes were more of an issue than they are today, as colleagues have grown accustomed to communicating via instant message and emailing materials.

We chose to have cell phones rather than a land line - so we have no ability to have a fax machine. I agree with sugarlander - everyone seems to want us to fax a document - either to them, or from them. So we began the search for an internet based fax service.

We first tried MyFax - because it seemed to be priced right, and got good reviews. They were very up front. They do not provide service in the Virgin Islands, because of the trouble with blocked *800* numbers.

We are currently looking at ringcentral. Unfortunately, they want us to commit to a service contract before they will allow us to hook up to an international service - which looks to me as if every fax is going to be an international call, with a commensurate toll charge. RingCentral does things other than fax service - so I may be confused by what they are talking about. But, when I was on a trial basis with them, and they assigned a *800* # - it worked from the continental US - but test Faxes from the Virgin Islands just showed that the number was busy - which I interpret to mean that the # was blocked.

So - we are still looking for an internet based fax service. If anyone has actually worked through the problems - we would love to know about it. We are still not looking at getting a land line. There has to be a way around this problem.

Thank you for your responses.

So it sounds like getting an e-fax type service is problematical in the VI. Therefore, I decided to get a call router and share the fax with the voice line. It's a minor inconvenience to tie up the voice line for a few minutes a month. It will save $80 a month compared to the cost of a business line.