Fax is the digital leading technology of the 80s and 90s of the last century. In today's environment of instant communication in multiple forms it is hard to remember how revolutionary and process changing the popular use of fax became.
For industries like legal, construction and real estate fax had a significant impact on how they operated and permitted an increased speed of transactions for many businesses.
Since the pervasive growth of the internet, email and online transactions since the early 2000s there have been increasing calls that fax is dead. This may be true for many operations but not for all.
Hold outs for fax, telephone or mail
There are still industries which have not moved away from the fax as a primary communications tool. Some construction sites still use the technology for verification and approvals. Medical information transfers like medication approvals, test results and reports are often still dependant on fax. Many government departments will only accept fax as the only form of electronic document transfer with no provisions for email communications. Some legal procedures and real estate deals still depend on fax for transport.
The challenge that businesses face is a need to be able to use fax when necessary but at a cost and convenience that makes sense when the volume of use is low and the instances of need are limited.
Limitations of traditional fax
Traditional fax has depended upon a form of dedicated equipment connected to a traditional analog telephone line on a one for one formula. Over time the shift to fax boards mounted in multifunction printers or to computer based fax boards has seen the number of individual fax devices decline. These newer fax connections have largely still required a business to pay for and retain tradition analog telephone lines for each device.
As volume of faxes declines the cost per fax of the telephone connection and the fax device has increased. This challenge has been aggravated as more and more businesses have migrated their phone systems to VOIP (Voice over IP) platforms which use digital lines and electronic network transfer to carry their phone calls. Unfortunately for fax use digital phone lines are not very compatible with the fax technology which was developed to work through protocols for tradition analog telephone systems.
New systems can help
A range of new fax support systems have been developed to deal with these challenges while taking advantage of the new communications platforms like email.
Largely service based instead of hardware based these new systems make it possible to continue to provide the fax support a business might need without the hard costs of fax machines, boards or analog phone lines.
An example of these systems is GoldFax which is a subscription based service which can support multiple sites, field offices, large enterprise operations or smaller businesses which need only small volumes of fax. It is compatible with dedicated fax numbers (can be virtual in nature), most office applications, multifunction printers with scan to email capability and all email platforms.
Using the electronic communications platforms that support modern communications it is possible to continue to provide fax type communications where it is needed without many of the costs of traditional faxing.
Using a dealer support and reseller model GoldFax can concentrate on the software development and backend systems to support users.
There are other similar types of service providers who have addressed this need, some focused on enterprise level delivery and a group who are focused on smaller users.
Before you put money into a new or replacement fax device. especially if you are doing a fleet adoption requiring multiple machines, take a look at these new service based systems as a viable alternative.
Lee K
