2022-12-30
Mainpine can now port most domestic fax numbers into our circuits.
After years-long searches for telephony and technology partners needed for porting of numbers with extremely reliable audio quality for fax, Mainpine is happy to announce that we can now port in most domestic fax numbers.
Customers who no longer wish to forward local numbers to Mainpine's direct numbers should provide the following information to our support representatives:
1) The fax number to port to your account.
2) The name of the current service provider of that fax number.
3) The account number with that service provider.
4) The billing contact name, business name, and address as shown on the invoice from that provider.
5) The porting PIN number for that fax number, if one is set.
6) Optional but helpful would be a copy of the latest invoice from that provider (at least the first page and subsequent pages, if necessary, which indicate the number to port).
Once all of the porting information is received and verified the porting process is usually completed within roughly two weeks.
If customers later choose to leave Mainpine's services they may port their fax number to another provider.
Charges for incoming faxes to ported numbers are $0.02/min as compared to $0.01/min for direct numbers. Total monthly charges are capped at $0.03/page, as usual. See our pricing information for details.
Is this a change of direction from previous statements?
Recent changes to traditional telecommunications regulations have made it ever increasingly difficult and expensive for consumers to obtain traditional TDM and POTS telecommunications services or VoIP services with the same audio quality as TDM and POTS services.
So, our customers were commonly being presented with a set of unpalatable options: give up a long-used fax number, pay increasingly expensive fees for reliable TDM forwarding, pay for TDM toll-free services, or cope with jitter and T.38 problems related to typical VoIP services.
Earlier statements were made based on some years of evaluation and testing of internet-based fax services which had not yielded any concrete evidence that there would be a reliable internet telecommunications partner available for fax services. Anecdotal evidence showed that it could be possible, as we noted that Verizon Fios was known to work well for fax. But, the prevailing thought at the time was that such exceptions may be using a proprietary technology - and that may continue to be true.
In collaboration with our telephony and technology partners Mainpine has now tapped into one of those exceptions, and that is the difference now. Mainpine has thoroughly tested the service for months and is very pleased with the result.
Does this now change our previous advice? It does, slightly.
Customers are still encouraged to have fax senders dial the number that we provide to them in the LATA of our datacenters. However, in the event that the customer wishes to retain and continue to use a different number, then Mainpine recommends that the customer evaluate the reliability and cost associated with forwarding versus porting that number. In many cases it will, indeed, be advisable to port the number instead of forwarding it. Mainpine support staff will be able to test and discern when a forwarded number is done poorly, so please ask us any questions that you may have.