Traditional Faxing
Over the past 30 years if you owned a business and wished to send papers to another destination, the quickest and most convenient form of transfer was the fax machine. A fax machine scans the papers fed to it, encodes the information, and transmits it over a telephone line. The fax machine on the receiving end decodes the information and prints it out. Multiple papers could be transferred in a matter of minutes saving time and mailing costs. As the speed of information sharing increases, businesses become faster and more efficient. Smarter businesses led to job creation and greater market consumption, thus the fax machine had a large role in the evolution of the modern market.
Internet Faxing
A fax machine can only transfer information over its set phone line, thus the fax can only process one fax at a time over its respective phone line. An internet fax on the other hand can be sent from any of thousands of lines thereby dramatically reducing the amount of time required to send or receive information. Also, if the phone line dedicated for a fax machine goes down the fax machine is useless. However, internet faxes can be sent from any device with internet connection. You might ask, with the advent of the internet why fax at all? Faxing is still required in many fields for legal reasons such as signature requirements and in some cases businesses are behind the times, but they provide necessary services. Let’s point out some other advantages of internet faxing.
Pricing
Traditional faxing requires a fax machine, paper, ink toners, a phone line, maintenance, software, and filing cabinets. Internet faxing is sent to your email so there is no machinery, paper, ink, maintenance, software, and all filing can be done on your computer or online. Many plans include online storage space for your faxes. This can save you hundreds of dollars over the course of a few years. A typical internet faxing account has a set up fee and a monthly payment plan. You are given a phone number and with many plans you can send and receive unlimited information. As the plan utilizes the internet you can send and receive multiple faxes at the same time thereby increasing the efficiency of your business. Also, a long distance fax is classified as a long distance phone call. In today’s global market, you’re going to pay a lot for those long distance faxes. Internet faxing costs the same amount regardless of distance.
Convenience
As internet faxes are sent to your email account, they can be accessed from any device with internet connection. This can be especially useful when traveling or when away from the fax machine. Additionally, this eliminates the need to carry around faxed papers containing important information. If you are a company owner and wish to share a fax with your employees, you can email the information or create a company email address which everyone can access thereby creating a very simple and far more efficient mode of information sharing. The data sent to your email account is saved in an encrypted format so you don’t have to worry about people accessing your information or papers left in a fax machine and picked up by the wrong person. Be sure to work with a professional internet faxing company with years of experience. As a last incentive, most companies offer free trials so if you’re still doubtful try it out, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Written by Johann Daniels of SR Fax, the leading company of internet faxing worldwide. He is passionate about the technilogical change of communication and productivity since 1986.