You may have noticed a recent trend that
has arrived online: the online fax. Sending faxes via the internet, rather than
via the traditional analogue (phone) lines has become the latest craze in
business. Is this just a passing phase? Or, does the internet fax have
something valuable to offer? We are going to explore these questions below.
Firstly, we must state that we are firmly
in favor of internet faxing, so we will mostly be focusing on the benefits of
such a system. There are very few down sides and this is largely because email
faxing is simply an evolved method of faxing that has improved on its
predecessor. If traditional faxes were that much better than email faxes, then
they would never have become obsolete.Ok, so let us move on to discuss the
advantages of the online fax :
Cost
Sending faxes via email is much more cost
effective than sending faxes in the traditional manner. There are numerous
savings to be made, which include:
1.
There is no need to purchase
expensive fax machines and equipment. This also means that there is no maintenance on
such machines, which considering the fax forms part of IT, can be very
expensive.
2.
There is no need to spend money
on a dedicated phone line, or to pay for each call. Now, you could argue that
in the past, some businesses did not have a dedicated line, but used their main
telephone line as a fax machine also, and so they are not saving money. However,
they still would have had to pay the fax to be sent, which in itself can mount
in cost.
3.
There is no need to print the
fax, so this will save money on paper and toner ink. You can still print your
faxes off if you change to internet faxing, but you do not have to, so you do have the option of
saving money in this respect.
Time
Sending faxes via the internet saves a lot
of time. Again, there are a few ways in which they save time:
1.
There is no need to wait for
the fax machine to dial the number and wait for the recipient’s machine to pick
up and accept the fax. From dialling the number to getting the ‘fax sent’
reply, can take up to three minutes, but when the recipient’s fax machine is
already receiving a fax, you get the engaged dial tone, and you then have to
resend the fax. It can take a long time just to send one fax if you are sending
the fax to a company that receives many faxes. With online faxing, you will not
have this problem. You can allow the software/third-party to do this for you.
Different providers will have different systems, but most will tell you when
the fax has been received by the recipient.
2.
You can send multiple faxes at
a time. In the past, the best-case scenario would be that the recipients fax
machine picked up the fax straightaway, so it would take 30 seconds to send a
fax. If you had ten faxes to send it would take five minutes, and that’s
best-case scenario. With internet fax, though, you can send a very large number
of fax at the same time. Again, the exact number of faxes that you can send at
once varies between providers, but all will allow you to send multiple faxes.
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