There are now dozens of different online fax services competing for your business. Some limited service packages are even free. How do they compare with the established, time-tested technology of the fax machine? In the online fax vs. email contest, is there a clear winner for all, or is the truth somewhere in the middle? Let's find out.

Fax machines revolutionized business when the technology became affordable (to businesses at first) in the 1970s. By the 1980s, they were ubiquitous in business and started making inroads into the home-office market. In the 1990s, faxes broke the psychological $99 price point and became a commodity item, for everyone. Improvements kept coming, making their use more affordable-plain paper vs. expensive special rolls, more dependable phone interfaces, copy/scan functions and so on. Faxes are still being used today, and are still a part of the multifunction office devices that themselves are becoming commodity items (and which are now wireless, to boot).

Fax machines are everywhere

There are approximately 125 million fax machines in use in the world today with more than four million new units being sold annually. Despite the rise of email and other communications technologies, fax machines continue to play an important part in business. Perhaps the main reason that faxes are still being used so widely is simplicity. They are easy to set up and use, have a familiar "appliance style" push-button operation and are thus a simple, nearly foolproof way to send and receive documents quickly and safely.

Because so many fax machines are still in use it was important for email to communicate with them. As with any new technology, the first online fax services were a little "clunky" and not 100% reliable. Those problems have all been addressed and online faxing is now straightforward and simple. With advancing numbers of computer-literate people in business, and society at large, some pundits have predicted the imminent demise of faxes. This is wishful thinking, as there are always people who will prefer appliances to cyberspace, and not everyone (yet) is using email.

Comparisons and contrasts

Email has taken over communications in business and the society at large. The great advantage of email is that it doesn't "kill trees"-no paper is used unless, for some reason, people need to print the message. Still, one has to deal with the huge numbers of people who are using faxes, so it is just a matter of commonsense to find the most efficient way of doing that. With online fax services, you don't have to get up from your desk to send a fax, or stand in line if there is only one in the office. The same goes for incoming communications-and with online faxing you always know when you have an incoming message. How many people have had their important faxes thrown away or picked up from the office machine by mistake? Too many.

Money talks, right? It speaks convincingly in this argument, and in favor of the online services. From limited free accounts to feature-laden services that still have monthly fees more affordable than a single toner cartridge, online faxing is a real bargain. Not only do you not have to buy toner or ink cartridges (the latter for those multifunction inkjet devices) you don't have to get dirty installing them either. You don't need "supplies" at all for electronic faxing, just an Internet connection and your trusty PC. Neither will you waste time waiting for a jammed fax to be fixed or a broken one replaced.

Time is money

You don't wait around listening to beeps and dial tones when you use online faxing, and you still get to multitask. As the fax is sent "in the background" by the online service, you are getting other work done. Think about how many five- and 10-minute pauses in your workflow are due to using a fax machine and you will conclude that you've devoted enough hours (days! months!) of your life to waiting for faxes to come, go or print out.

When you consider all the facts, it's hard to justify using a fax machine anymore. However, because others do, you need to accommodate them. A low- or no-cost online fax service will keep you in touch with every corner of the wired world, even the aging one, and save you time, money and frustration. You won't ruin a good pair of pants by getting toner streaks all over them, and you will do your part to create a more sustainable, environmentally friendly mode of business communications. Once you get the facts, you'll get the online fax service-it's that simple.