Facsimile

More than 50 million facsimile (fax) machines are in use in the United States, demonstrating the fact that fax transmission is still a critical channel for a wide variety of business communications, ranging from office correspondence and narrative documents of all kinds to computer-generated invoices, purchase orders, and other business forms.

Facsimile transmissions have become an indispensable part of everyday business life. In the United States, faxing accounts for 30 percent of corporate telecommunications bills. Fortune 500 companies alone spend an average of $15 million annually on fax-related transmission charges. In other countries where telecommunications costs more, faxing accounts for 40 percent to 65 percent of the bill.

Fax transmission can be implemented with a stand-alone fax machine, from desktop computers that are equipped with a modem/fax card, or through a fax server on a LAN. Stand-alone fax machines are still popular, despite the heavy reliance on LANs for all forms of communication. While they offer an economical solution in that they can be shared among many users, these stand-alone devices require the user to go to the machine whenever he or she needs to send or receive faxes. This situation wastes time and exposes documents to prying eyes. The big advantage of stand-alone devices, however, is that they accept printed documents that are not already in electronic form on someone s computer.

Many desktop computers now come equipped with a modem/fax card, enabling the computer to act like a fax machine. Large organizations find this solution expensive, however, because...