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The low-down on Internet fax

By Joel Snyder
Network World on Groupware and Messaging, 05/19/99

So what's the story with Internet fax? It seems easy enough ... you sign up for one of these services and get a phone number somewhere in the U.S. Maybe in your city but probably not (unless you're willing to pay for it). Then incoming faxes are shunted off to the e-mail box of your choice. So who's paying for it? Well, in the time-honored approach of all Internet businesses, advertisers are supposedly paying. When you get a fax, the service bureau stitches an advertisement of some sort before the first page so you have to see what they have to say about breath mints or copiers or some such before you can read your free fax.

What's really happening is that the companies providing free Internet fax are already huge fax service bureaus, providing broadcast and point-to-point fax services for legitimate businesses all over the world. This is big business because it's a lot cheaper to pay these guys to handle your faxes than to make the phone calls yourself, particularly if you're in Europe or Asia and you want to fax internationally. So these companies already have a lot of infrastructure and equipment and it's just a matter of trying to get additional revenue from the existing gear.

Having a company with a rational business plan behind your faxes is nice because it's unlikely that they're going to go out of business with two days' notice. Since many advertiser-supported Internet businesses are no more stable than your average pyramid scheme, you don't want to pass out a phone number as your fax number only to have it respond with "the number you are calling has been disconnected."

On the other hand, if you're like me, you probably get two kinds of personal faxes. One is from someone who says "what's your fax number; I have something I want to send you." And the other is from someone who wants you to buy diet pills or refilled toner cartridges. With that in mind, maybe it's not such a big deal to have a personal fax number which changes every six or twelve months. That's the tradeoff with this kind of service, getting more than you pay for. However great this service may be there is no guarantee that it will stick around.

I wouldn't suggest that a business hoping to present a professional front use one of these services. The security implications alone are frightening. However, for personal use and for some business uses, these are great. Imagine being out of town and wanting to receive a fax. You can pay the hotel $2 a page, or you can grab it over the Internet (assuming your company doesn't have this service for itself, which perhaps it should). Or you could be somewhere without fax services, but somewhere you can download e-mail. Then there are personal faxes to consider --- if your travel agent can fax but can't e-mail you can make your vacation plans without advising the entire office.

Some Internet fax businesses even look like they might last the year. A few are depending on "value added" services, such as 800 numbers or specific phone number cities, which will increase revenue to help pay for costs. Others suggest that they will change from free services to fee services when they have to. And some even look sound, financially, from the start, charging a fee for all services.

The fax market, of course, is just the beginning. If incoming faxes are supported then outgoing faxes can be too --- it's just a question of how to charge for them. Similarly, the same technology that does incoming faxes can be easily adapted to incoming voice mail --- and it's only going to be a few weeks before some of the free fax services also offer you free voice mail delivered directly to your e-mail box.

Free e-mail, free fax, free voice mail, free Internet access. This is a great time to be on a budget!