R.I.P. FAX - How Manufacturers Should Modernize FAX Machines.
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 3/23/2015 1:00:00 AM
Fax machines will vanish, unless they step into the 21st century.
When the first fax machine came out, it was expensive, and useless, because nobody else one. After all, what good is a machine that sends documents, unless you have people to send them to? So, the first buyers mainly bought them in pairs, so they could send documents between their own offices.
As time went on, and the number of people who owned them grew, their usefulness increased to the point where people could potentially send documents to just about anyone. This was exactly what happened when the first phones were introduced. The first phones were useless, because there wasn't anyone to call. As more people got phones, the usefulness of having your own phone increased.
With that in mind, the phone is still just as popular than ever, and more people in the world have phones today than ever before. In fact, because of cell phones, there are now countless people getting their first phone in countries that don't even have access to traditional land lines.
However, fax machine usage is declining, especially in the US.
Obviously, most of the decreases are because of the Internet, but if manufacturers took the time to modernize fax machines, this wouldn't be the case.
Here are a few ways fax machines can be modernized...
1. Modern fax protocols should optionally use the Internet, instead of phone lines for the actual transmission of the pages. Since existing fax machines are based upon phone numbers, both sides would still be connected to phone lines, however, once the destination is reached, they would simply exchange IP addresses and a temporary / dynamic encryption key used to send the actual pages over the Internet. This would drastically reduce busy signals and the time needed to send documents, while increasing image resolution and security.
This feature can be completely backward compatible, because it still uses phone lines. The Internet feature would only kick in when both sides are using a modern machine.
2. Fax machines should all have touch screens or alphanumeric keyboards, so people can easily send directly to an email address, bypassing the phone lines entirely.
3. Fax machines should use much higher resolution, and color. While there are some machines that claim to have color, there still isn't an industry standard, so most of them are not compatible with each other.
4. Speed. Most fax machines still use very slow connections, so they need to either step up to faster modems, use Internet protocols as I mentioned above, or use better compression. Either way, they need to be faster, especially if we want better resolution and color.
Without at least some modernization, the number of people using a fax machine will continue to decline, which will reverse the pattern that led to it's original growth. As fewer people use them, the number of people getting rid of their fax machines will snowball until there are so few people to send faxes to that nobody will want one.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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