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Date: November 16, 1998

Title: Faxing For Less Over the Internet

Author: By Joo-Pierre S. Ruth

Subject: E-mail and faxes are technological cousins sharing cyberspace as a medium to transmit messages.

Section: FOCUS: Office Technology

Fax machines connected to telephone lines have long been a staple of home-based offices and mega-corporations. In recent years, fax-service providers brought this capability to the Internet to bring down the cost of transmissions. This store-and-forward system, however, is fraught with inefficiencies like slow service due to high networking traffic. Now, several New Jersey companies are offering improved “real-time” systems to provide more secure service at lower costs.

Last year, nearly 400 billion fax pages were transmitted worldwide by companies, governments and private users, according to First Albany Research of Albany, New York. Banks increasingly use faxes to send notification of the electronic transfer of funds as opposed to writing and mailing checks for each transaction. Many companies fax invoices to clients to speed the payment process. Publications like BUSINESS NEWS and the New York Times circulate fax editions of their newspapers. With the increase in faxing, businesses have been outsourcing jobs to fax-service providers, which have Internet connections that can undercut the costs of long-distance telephone charges.

While savings from using the Internet may be as little as $0.10 per page, that adds up when a company needs to send 20,000 pages to its offices around the globe. In fact, 44 million fax pages were transmitted via the Internet last year. According to the Gartner Group, a Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm, that number will grow to 5.6 billion pages by 2001. The Internet”s shortcomings as a medium for faxing are now being addressed through technological innovation.

William Fallon, vice president of marketing for FaxSav, an Edison-based fax-service provider, notes that many companies in recent years have used a local area network (LAN) connection to send hard-copy faxes as e-mail. LAN connections have traditionally been used for computer-file transfers between offices. By connecting fax machines to these networks, use of the phone line is eliminated. “Through a LAN, you can send a fax over existing data lines and deliver the fax anywhere in the world by connecting to our Internet fax network,” he says. FaxSav links with its client”s LAN in order to allow a direct transmission. The messages are then shuttled out as e-mail over the Internet.

The pages that result in a fax document can also originate from a digital source. “We can deliver your e-mail as a fax,” says Jay Goodwin, manager of sales support for Premiere Technologies, formerly Xpedite, a fax-service provider in Eatontown. Software applications provided by firms like Premiere Technologies allow e-mail to be formatted into data that can be printed out of fax machines and vice-versa.

One problem generated by faxing over the Internet is more of an annoyance than a technical malfunction. According to Moran Aatz, system engineer for VocalTec Communications, an Internet-telephony company in Northvale, junk mail similar to the kind filling e-mail boxes is taking the form of fax pages. Companies with access to fax-service providers can flood both fax machines and e-mail simultaneously by jumping on to the Internet, creating a document and transmitting it to both types of destinations.

According to industry insiders, the primary problem with Internet faxing stems from the nature of the medium. “Like e-mail, when you send a fax message out over the Internet, there”s no way of knowing if it arrived at its destination or when,” says Goodwin. Aatz echoes this remark. “When you rely on e-mail service to fax, there is no confirmation that the page has been received,” he says.

Fax machines report failures in transmission and record the dialed destination. Until this past year, this type of transmission tracking has not been possible with faxes sent over Internet connections. To deal with this problem, the industry adopted a protocol called real-time faxing. “There is a battle to get into real-time faxing,” says Aatz. With additional equipment and software, the sending machine dials a local access number over a phone line for a fax-service provider who in turn connects through Internet protocols to the destination area. There, the data reverts back to the phone line for reception. Fax-service providers have done their best to keep this exchange simple for their clients. “The idea is to make the system transparent to the personnel,” Aatz says.

Connecting to a fax-service provider for Internet transmission can be done with a $100 piece of hardware attached to an existing fax machine, or through Internet ports from a computer, which run $300 to $500. Through either system, the transmission is automated to connect directly to the fax-service provider.

Several companies with fax services, such as Dialogic of Parsippany, Premiere Technolgies, FaxSav and VocalTec Communications, claim to pioneer this technology. While these companies boast of real-time connections, there is still a delay as information is converted to a digital form, then forwarded to its destination. Upping the ante in this competition is VocalTec Communications, which is pursuing what Aatz calls “true real-time”. As Aatz explains, true real-time will allow pages to be processed and confirmed at their destination as they are passing through the originating fax machine. The gains are more for surety of transmission than speed. “The time difference is not much at all, though,” he says.

Fallon of FaxSav and the other experts agree that the field is becoming more competitive as smaller fax-service providers spring up to explore the Internet”s capabilities. Steven Shaw, director of marketing for the California-based fax business unit of Dialogic, notes that e-mail and faxing are becoming indistinct and combined service will become standardized. “We are going to see a new integration of fax and computers,” he says.