For a moment, if we may, let’s first consider what a fax machine actually is, rather than what it does. Fax machines are a combination of antiquated technology. It is simply a document feeder, attached to a low quality scanning element (which reduces document quality), and transmits the scan through an ancient modem (which takes a long time).
Back in the day, this was all new technology and was great, because you could send a ‘picture’ through the phone line. We all know very well that nowadays, we can do better. Most fax machines transmit data over an analog phone line at a rate of 14,400 bps (that is Bytes per second, BYTES!). That is very slow, even for modem standards. For a comparison, we now have broadband lines that are capable of more than 100mbps (100mbps X 1000Kbytes X 1000Bytes = 100,000,000 Bytes!).
Most fax goes to someone’s email anyway.
Many people seem to think that they “NEED” to have a fax machine, simply because they need to receive faxes. Fortunately, this is false. There are several service providers who have a ‘fax-to-email’ service, that when a fax is ‘received’, it gets converted into a pdf (or other format) and shows up in your inbox! There are numerous internet fax companies to choose from. Internet faxing service is very similar to traditional faxing, except that all of the data transfer happens over the internet, rather than a phone line and does not require extra equipment (like the fax machine) or phone lines.
It is legal to send any document by email.
This is true in about 95% of cases. There is actually some speculation on this point; however, it appears that it is up to the discretion of the receiver. Some companies will not accept digital signatures, while other companies require them. Stranger still is that a few companies still refuse to use any form of digital transfer and only accept notarized and certified mail. Talk about cost inflation!
Save money by not having an analog fax line.
Using an internet fax also means eliminating the need for additional office equipment and phone numbers. Fax machines can be large, bulky, need supplies, and maintenance. Imagine how much paper and toner you would go through if every email you got instead came through the fax machine! An email-to-fax service eliminates all of these additional costs while maintaining a low monthly cost. There are several service providers available, several of which are compared by NextAdvisor.
If someone asks you to fax them something, ask if they can get it by email instead.
Surprisingly, people still insist on using this old technology, even though we have much more sophisticated high quality network scanning capability, mostly just because they are used to it and know how it works already. This becomes a problem for businesses which have large fax volumes because they are still ‘making a call’ and not only pay monthly for the phone line, but may also pay for long distance overages. One example is of a larger company that uses internal faxing. In a case such as this, someone will take a document that they have created or received, print it out, and fax it over. Then, the other party (in the same building) will receive it, scan it back in, and waste a bunch of time, only to have a reduced quality document that took a long time to get. In a newer world, they could just be using a shared data drive on a server (since they are in the same network) or a service to transfer documents, no phone line required! There are many alternative options to this as well.