What is a decent DOCSIS3.0 modem with WiFi?

Bev (or, anyone else), do you have experience sending or receiving fax through Ooma/internet style telephony gear? Will standard MFP devices work well on an Ooma line? Otherwise, what could be reasonable work-arounds?

Thanks. Cheers, -- tlvp

i use an epson multifunction printer plugged into an ata and it works great. be sure everything supports fax over voip (i forget the official protocol name).

No State sales tax in: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon. HTH. Cheers, -- tlvp

And they're happy to sell you off to the highest bidder -- our POTS and DSL services got sold off to Frontier less than a year ago, and all the at&t wireline real estate and service vans in this town have been painted over with Frontier artwork (meanwhile AT&T Wireless is still AT&T).

Of course, Verizon has (reportedly) been doing much the same thing.

Cheers, -- tlvp

Happened here once, too, though with squirrels. A service tech sent out to investigate our problems found there was no DHCP-assigned IP address for our device, went up the pole and found a nice vampire-tap-like puncture in the coax right near a connector end (squirrel tooth, he conjectured), lopped that out and spliced in a short replacement section and, upon examination of the puncture in what he'd cut away, found it had neatly severed the inner solid copper conductor, probably allowing some sort of HF capacitative coupling to get some signal to the set-top equipment, but not at a level good enough for DHCP negotiations.

Fun, eh? Cheers, -- tlvp

I have a customer with Ooma and a Brother MFC-7360N: Incoming faxes work nicely and reliably. Outgoing is a crap shoot. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

However, there's a complication. The company has 3 Ooma lines. Two in the base unit and the fax using a plug into an Ooma Lynx adapter. Ooma recommended some setting in the printer which helped, but did not solve the problem. Yes, the "fax mode" is set: I was able to temporarily move the line to the main unit which seemed to solve the problem, but was unable to decode the Ooma programming to make the change permanent. At this time, I don't know if it's the Ooma Lynx, or something in the fax machine. I tried a different fax machine, which made things worse. Therefore, I suspect it's an Ooma Lynx problem.

I have 3 other customers with Ooma and all-in-one printer/fax/scan machines that are not having any problems with faxing. However, there have been several VoIP phone customers that I've steered in the direction of various eFax type services as an alternative to paying for a phone line or that were having reliability problems.

Of course there are.

That's interesting. But I think it's a FEDERAL tax. Is there anyone here in those taxless states that has an Ooma? Do you pay monthly tax just for owning the thing (like you do with a car or house)?

I think it's not "really" AT&T anymore. Someone else, I think, simply bought the name.

I have never tried faxing, but the Ooma has a standard female telephone jack, so, you just plug in "normal" telephony equipment.

At least that's what I do.

Yes, the router will be dual band, and as much power as I can get but they don't usually even show the power. It will be n band also.

Is there anything else of import (I'm not worried about 'easy setup').

1. Dual band (5Ghz & 2.4Ghz, with guest)
2. At least "n".

Anything else nowadays (I haven't bought a router since 'n' came out).

The more acronyms, the better (and the more expensive). You can get the real xmit power by finding the FCC ID number, and looking up the test results on the FCC ID web pile: You can also get some good reviews and details at:

1. Gigabit ethernet ports.
2. 802.11ac (optional).
3. QoS router settings for VoIP.

For my own abuse, I like to have:

1. DD-WRT and other 3rd party firmware availability.
2. Wireless client isolation.
3. SNMP management.
4. Wi-Fi Alliance certification.
5. WPA2-enterprise for running an external RADIUS server. These are certainly overkill but might be useful.

Well, the only things that have appeared since 802.11n (about 5 years) are designer packaging, strange looking antenna farms, firmware bugs,

Nope, never had/tried fax with anything. Aren't there software fax-facsimiles?

Jeff, that's a GREAT HINT!

The FCC *knows* the transmit and recieve power, because they have to authorize the device. I love the idea.

Thanks for the great idea and the courtesy URLs!

I hadn't realized that Ethernet got that fast in a home router. My boy has probably never hooked his computer to a "wire", but, that's a nice thing to have speed in Ethernet when it's there.

Thanks for that hint!

No such experience here, even switching from consumer to business class. They largely leave me alone, and my service is relatively reliable, which is exactly what I want (knock on wood). But yes, their customer service folks are a bunch of assholes. : )

His advice about purchasing the cable modem and router separately is a good one, IMO. That's the setup I use, with a Motorola SURFboard SB6121 and an Apple Airport Extreme.

Are you worried about router security updates? If so, Apple's routers typically get updated automatically and far more frequently (and for a longer time in their life span as well) than most third-party Linux-based routers.

Think about it. When the wireless is advertised as "up to 600 Mbits/sec), it would be a good idea to have the ethernet interface go at a similar rate. A 10/100baseT ethernet is only really good up to about 70 Mbits/sec. Once wireless speeds exceeded that, gigabit ethernet became a necessity. Whether you'll actually see such speeds is dubious, but the big numbers do look good on the advertising literature.