The fax might seem like an antiquated relic in this high-tech Internet age, but the truth is that a surprising amount of businesses, governments and various industries around the world still depend on this decades-old technology to exchange various types of documents.
An estimated 46.3 million fax machines are still said to be in use around the world, with the majority of those located in developed, technologically-advanced countries such as the US and Japan, the countries reportedly boasting the world's largest and second most amounts of fax machines respectively, with the US said to have 17 396 892 and Japan apparently being in possession of an astonishing 11 898 891.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, the normally technologically-savvy Japanese still regard hand-written faxes in high esteem for cultural reasons, and in 2011, the Japanese Cabinet Office said that almost 100% of business offices and 45% of private homes there still had fax machines.
Here in South Africa, the fax is still alive and well too, remaining a critical part of conducting business. "Faxing in South Africa has evolved over the past few years, especially with the advent of fax to e-mail," says Mitchell Barker, CEO of WhichVoIP.co.za, a comprehensive online directory which lists many of South Africa's voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) providers. "A large amount of South Africans jumped on the fax to e-mail bandwagon, because it was a new product which allowed people to receive faxes to their e-mail addresses for free, but what everyone soon found out was that it cost the senders about four times more than it cost to send a fax to a regular analogue fax machine. Even to this day it remains far more expensive to send a fax to a fax to e-mail number than to a regular fax number."
Barker says unless VOIP providers have the ability to support fax over IP (FOIP) services over a T.38-enabled network, which will enable their customers to reliably send and receive faxes in real time by plugging an adapter into an existing fax machine and using it to transmit and receive faxes over their VoIP lines, FoIP remains a bit of a hit and miss scenario. "With FOIP, reliability has always been a bit of an issue. People were never sure whether documents were delivered in their entirety. That leaves people with either the old analogue lines for fax, or back with the fax to e-mail services. Luckily there is a next-generation fax to e-mail service called Virtual Fax (VFax) which is one of the best, most cost effective solutions which we have come across."
According to Barker, VFax's first claim to fame is its ability to port an existing Telkom landline number into its fax to e-mail service. "Other unique benefits of the service includes that all faxes received via the service are archived for five years, at no cost to their infrastructure or additional resource overheads. Each fax received had a unique tracking number, ensuring that no fax will ever get "lost" ever again, and each user registered on the Virtual Fax platform is assigned their own personal fax inbox on the Virtual Fax server which can be access via a secure login on the web."
Barker says the advantages of the VFax solutions extend to the cost savings too. "Calling a Virtual Fax to e-mail number is charged at 80c per minute, which is half the rate of traditional fax to e-mail solutions. Also, since faxes are being delivered to an e-mail inbox and not printed automatically on a fax machine, it contributes to further cost savings since less paper and toner are used. Users also have the convenience of receiving faxes on their laptops or cellphones, whenever and wherever they are."
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