[cisco-voip] VG202 vs ATA187

[Norton, Mike]

I would take it further and say, if you want good and reliable fax service, USE EMAIL! Faxing is obsolete. Expensive, kludgey user experience, doesn't do anything that modern alternatives can't, etc. Nobody would even use faxing anymore if it weren't for the fact that old people are afraid to get rid of it. Photocopiers pretty much all have scan-to-email as a standard feature these days, for the folks who insist on involving paper in the process.

I've done fax-email gateways, ATAs, FXSes, POTS lines, and what they all have in common is that faxing is ancient crap that just plain sucks. No way around it. We pointed out to our administration the amount of money faxing costs and asked them to consider if they actually receive that amount of value out of it. Response was cautious but receptive.

IMO, the end goal of any fax deployment should be phasing it out, just as with any deployment of ancient legacy crap.

-mn


From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Haas, Neal
Sent: April-19-13 12:10 PM
To: Matthew Ballard; 'Angel Castaneda'; cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] VG202 vs ATA187

If you want good and reliable fax service stay away from the Analog VoIP solutions - we have done all of the above, ATA186,ATA187, VG202, VG224 the last two being the best. With all of these devices your fax machines will need to be reduced to 24.4(?) KB on the fax machines (which doubles send and receive times). I have some faxes that can receive up to 1000 faxes per day. We ended up moving them back to 1MB's. Just to be clear we had installed over 200 ports on a range of these ATA devices, a majority have now been put back on 1MB's just to stop the helpdesk calls.

We worked with Cisco for 3 years, even were given demo devises to test. In the end we were on a conference call with a TAC engineer and he said "why would you use the ATA's for faxes? I always tell my customers to leave Faxing to AT&T"

If you want to work yourself into the funny farm go with Analog on VoIP.

For a different Idea, try FoIP -  OMTools. We are going with this solution and have just finished a trial with it and it works.

Just my 2 cents

Neal Haas

From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Matthew Ballard
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 10:13 AM
To: 'Angel Castaneda'; cisco-voip at puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-voip at puck.nether.net>
Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] VG202 vs ATA187

The VG202 runs IOS, which means it can do pretty much anything any other IOS based voice gateway can do (taking into account that it only has the two voice ports).

The ATA 187 is more of a client device.  I know the 186 was much more limited it's fax support (for example it didn't do standards based T.38).  I don't know how the 187 does in comparison, but I found the 186 to be very unreliable in terms of doing faxes.

Basically the VG202 gives you more power and control over configuration, and is more capable, but the ATA 187 is easier to setup, but (at least to me) an unknown level of handling of fax.

Matthew Ballard
Network Manager
Otis College of Art and Design
mballard at otis.edu<mailto:mballard at otis.edu>

From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Angel Castaneda
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 7:34 AM
To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-voip at puck.nether.net>
Subject: [cisco-voip] VG202 vs ATA187

Good morning all,

We're looking at moving our fax machines to CUCM 9.1, but we do not have the need for a VG224, as it's only a few devices.

Other than the extra Ethernet port on a VG202, is there another reason I should be choosing that over an ATA187? Price-wise, the ATA187 is more attractive to us.

Thank you in advance,

Angel Castaneda
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