Fax Featured Article

While many have come to regard the fax as an antiquated technology, all but useless in the face of more modern methods, others have instead come to regard it as a valuable communications platform. Thanks to some new technological boosts like the fax server and the multifunction copier, faxing is experiencing something of a renaissance, though it never really went away in the first place.

The fax is said to provide maximum security--it's much harder to tamper with a fax transmission than with an email, leading some like Brent Lothrop, president of The Fax Guys, to call it "the only guaranteed way to transmit something electronically"--and a surprising ease of use. The fax machine's sheer ubiquity--it's been in continuous use for years now--also gives it a bit of an edge over other communications methods.

The medical market, governed by federal privacy rules, is also very big on faxing, and when the growth rate of the health care industry as a whole is factored in, that signals a breath of new life for the fax. The numbers in favor for faxing are also pretty impressive, as Medtronic sends and receives about 20,000 faxes per day. US Bancorp reports around two million total faxes--incoming and outgoing--per month, and the worldwide fax market is expected to reach close to $2 billion by the end of the year.

Moreover, setting up a basic fax system is much easier--and much less expensive--than setting up a secure email system. Since fax machines send a picture of a document, and from one point to another, the end result is much more secure and much more difficult to hack than email, which is simply a document that can be intercepted at a variety of points.

While traditional fax machines may be on the decline, their use in computers and in copiers is keeping the spirit alive. Indeed, some businesses have been using an integrated fax and computer approach for some time, using the two together to create a way to keep in regular contact with customers that can even be automated. But faxing isn't without its problems, the main one of which is cost. Sending an email costs virtually nothing, but sending a fax has costs associated with it, whether using the standard phone line as a transmission medium, or by using fax-over-Internet-protocol services that charge by the message.

The Fax Guys, for example, represent a fax software product that uses the Internet to send faxes, but charges $20,000 for a one-time license, then $4,000 per year for maintenance of a fax server that can send 4,000 messages in one eight hour day. While this number is low for those sending thousands of faxes a year--Medtronic and US Bancorp level faxing--the numbers are prohibitively high for smaller businesses that will likely never send that many faxes in a year let alone a day.

However, it's quite clear that the fax system won't be going away any time soon, no matter how many have already thought it dead. While faxing may not be what it once was, it has grown and adapted to changing times and changing technologies alike.