Fax

I have been fighting fax machine problems the last few weeks.  It's really gotten me thinking about how we need to end faxing as we know it.

The fax is a rather old technology.  The basic technology was invented in 1843, even before the telephone.  It was able to send images across telegraph wires.  In 1964, Xerox began selling the first commercial fax machine that could work over the telephone.  It took time to catch on due to the high costs, but by 1980 faxes were becoming commonplace.

Consider that in 1980, few of us even had VCRs or CD players, let alone computers.  By technology standards, even the modern fax is ancient.  It transmits painfully slowly when compared to modern means of communication and mostly wastes paper.  There really is no good reason why we still use faxes today.

Today, most documents are already in electronic format.  Emailing them to someone is much faster, cheaper and more convenient.  Some insist that faxes are important because paper documents still need to be transmitted.  But there is no reason that on those few occasions, one cannot simply scan the document and email it that way.

Transmitting a fax takes minutes rather than seconds via email.  It often incurs long distance charges and often requires one or more dedicated phone lines.  There are additional equipment costs, compared with email which uses the same computer you use for everything else.  There are also confidentiality and more time lag issues since faxes are sent to a common location and then need to be distributed by hand.  Once received, an email attachment can by copied or redistributed easily by use of the forward function.  By contrast, a fax must be taken to a copier and redistributed by hand, or scanned into an image for further processing.

Faxes were great in their day, but that day is long passed.

That said, some of our clients still use faxes and we need to accommodate them.  Many years ago, I looked into some fax server options for the firm.  These involved giving everyone a separate fax line.  Incoming faxes could then be distributed automatically to the recipient via email or file transfer.  We rejected this option then because the machine itself would have cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, but we would also have to spend thousands more each month for the hundreds of fax lines needed for such a system.  Such an investment in a dying technology seemed foolish.

But because fax has lingered as a needed service.  I have begun looking at some other options.  One would be to get a single device located in our main office that could serve as the receiving point for faxes to any of our offices.  Rather than being printed, the faxes would be saved as PDF documents.  Someone at Reliable, or other designated staff, could sort through the faxes and email them as an attachment to the final recipient.

We would also have a desktop application that would allow you to send faxes as easily as printing a document.  Paper documents could be scanned as images and then sent through the fax application.

With such a system in place, we could do away with traditional fax machines entirely.