Internet faxing: Simple way to send your faxes online
By Claudia Walters
Nowadays, fax services are undeniable one of the most important communications
among human. If doesn't matter how big is your business, what's your business
nature and how you run your business - you just need a fax service to send out
those documents. The recent survey that shows a bigger percentage of business
phone bills are for faxing prove that the fax is still one of the 'must-have services'
for your office.
However, faxing nowadays doesn't rely only on conventional faxing machine.
By utilizing the Internet, we can now easily send out 'eFax'. Internet faxing,
or sometimes known as email faxing or online fax, is one of the latest technologies
that provides its users to send and receive faxes without a fax machine. Instead,
Internet access and an email account is all that is required.
Why use Internet faxing?
If you have ever owned a fax machine then you can understand how frustrating
it is when it jams, cuts off page text, stops in the middle of a transmission,
or the receiving machine is constantly busy or out of paper. Further more, extra
cost of fax machine, the installation of a separate phone line to avoid conflicts
with your answering machine, and the ongoing cost of replacement toner cartridges
- all this piled up to be huge expenses that cannot be avoided.
Now imagine you can eliminate all these: no more paper jamming, smooth transmission,
24 hours stand by with no more engage tone, and most of all, minimum cost for
maintaining the service. This is what an Internet faxing service can give.
Internet is the perfect way to send faxes because they don't have to be sent
in real time as a phone call does. It's usually not a problem if
it takes a few seconds longer to transmit so long as it gets there in a reasonably
short time and it is error free.
Using Internet fax, you don't need to pay for the extra phone line, fax equipments
and maintenance cost. All you need is to pay the subscribing fees to the faxing
software and the cost per fax.
Who's hot in Internet faxing?
In the past year and a half, several vendors have produced and are selling
Internet faxing services. There are several different flavors of this idea.
There are companies that offer software only solutions that allow you to fax
directly from your computer to any fax machine; and there are services offer
fax-to-IP Internet gateway products, which are hardware-based routers that emulate
a fax machines.
Faxing services that use software (for example eFax) require that you sign
up with fax service provider. Using this software makes faxing as easy as printing.
These services are good for companies that primarily send outgoing faxes from
their computers.
The advantages of using this method are that faxing becomes considerably cheaper
because you are not making long distance connections over the phone lines, no
hardware is required, you get faster transmission, you can send many faxes at
once, no dedicated fax lines are needed, and a web interface is available if
you wish to add fax-on-demand capability to a website.
The disadvantages are documents must be sent from your computer. With these
services, there is no support for fax-to-IP gateways.
While for fax-to-IP Internet gateway products you will need a hardware based
routers that emulate a fax machines. With these, faxing is done in the regular
way using the fax machine, but the gateway device, which then dials the destination
fax machine and sends the fax, interrupts the process.
This service is good if you don't send a lot of faxes, but would still like
to take advantage of the savings of using Internet delivery. It is also good
if you do a lot of international fax calls. The disadvantages are that you won't
save much on either domestic faxing, or faxing to countries where the Internet
infrastructure is less well developed.
Conclusions
You probably come to this article while looking for substitution for your conventional
fax machine. If so, we recommend fax software to be the services to go for.
With the various services available now in the market, you can easily get a
good bargain on the faxing. After some details studies, we think eFax is currently
the best faxing services to go for. eFax currently provide three different packages:
eFax Pro for heavy faxing usage ($19.95/month); eFax Plus for average use ($12.95/month)
and eFax Free ($0/month) that allows you to receive free faxes thru Internet!
For more details on eFax services, we suggest this eFax
review sites (http://www.myinternetfax.biz) for more readings.
About the Author The author, Claudia Walters, is one of the expert writter in office tools and technologies. View her latest writting assignments at Internet faxing (fax to email) technology and CallWave call alert services.
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