Internet Faxing According to recent surveys of large corporations, a very big percentage of both their domestic and international long distance bills were for faxing. It seems that more and more people are relying on fax for inter office and customer correspondence. This is a lot of extra expense.
Now, the Internet is the perfect way to send faxes becasue they don't have to be sent in "real time" as a phone call does. It's usually not a problem if it takes a few seconds longer to transmit so long as it gets there in a reasonably short time and is error free.
In the past year and a half, several vendors have produced and are selling Internet Fax delivery serivces. There are several different flavours of this idea.
Internet Faxing Software
There are companies that offer software only solutions that allow you to fax directly from your computer to any fax machine. These require that you sign up with fax service provider. Using this software makes faxing as easy as printing. These services are good for companies that primarily send outgoing faxes from their computers.
The advantages of using this method are that faxing becomes considerbly cheaper because you are not making long distance connections over the phone lines, no hardware is required, you get faster transmission, you can send many faxes at once, no dedicated fax lines are needed, and a web interface is available if you wish to add fax-on-demand capability to a website.
The disadvantages are documents must be sent from your computer. With these services, there is no support for fax-to-IP gateways. This software requires Win95 or Windows NT, and there are no cross-platform clients yet.
Fax to Internet Gateways (Hardware Products)
If your company needs to send physical documents you will need hardware will trick your fax machine into accepting the Internet as if it were a fax machine. Some companies offer fax-to-IP Internet gateway products which are hardware based routers that emulate a fax machines. With these, faxing is done in the regular way using the fax machine, but the process is interrupted by the gateway device which then dials the destination fax machine and sends the fax.
You can build your own Internet fax gateway. All the need materials exist.
Fax to Internet Gateways (Service Providers)
If your business does not fax a lot and cannot justify the purchase of a hardware based gateway, there are companies which now offer gateway services that you can access through your local telephone network. These services are good if you are doing a lot of international faxing. With these, you call a toll-free number, and a voice prompt answers, you enter the destination phone number and PIN, then you press the SEND key on your fax machine. The fax is then captured on the carrier's server and transmitted via FTP to a distant node, and then sent to the destination from the other end.
This service is good if you don't send a lot of faxes, but would still like to take advantage of the savings of using Internet delivery. It is also good if you do a lot of international fax calls.
The disadvantages are that you won't save much on either domestic faxing, or faxing to countries where the Internet infrastructure is less well developed.
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