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Internet Fax Services

Local Internet Fax

by Christopher Thompson

The concept of local internet fax is something of a misnomer. The idea itself is actually a holdover from the mid-'90s when some forms of internet faxing were a hybrid of internet gateways and fax nodes. These hybrid systems were designed primarily for corporate users and functioned well under corporate circumstances.

The design itself was fairly simple. An internet-enabled fax gateway was installed at a physical site. These sites would be as near as possible to corporate buildings that handled a great amount of fax traffic. Documents would then be sent via fax machine to the gateway, which would then utilize the Internet to reach one of the other corporate gateways--whichever was closest to the point of destination. The receiving gateway would then initiate a phone-based fax to complete the fax transfer.

Basically, the system went from fax machine to internet gateway to the next internet gateway, and would finally be received by another fax machine. This obviously did little to change the manner in which faxes were sent, with the exception that corporate users no longer paid for long distance charges as often. The net result was an ad hoc system that reduced costs but could only be purchased by corporations. In essence, this system did little for small businesses or individuals. It must be kept in mind, however, that this did allow developers and researchers to test out the concept of true internet faxing before it became a trend.

Today, that method is still in use, but purchasing the requisite hardware is no longer needed. Many companies provide internet faxing capabilities at monthly and yearly rates that the mass market consumer can justify. With prices ranging from $10 to $30 on average per month, internet faxing has become a commoditized industry. When you purchase a monthly or yearly plan, you are still using something similar to the system devised in the mid-'90s, but the providing company has already invested the time and money to create the system. The user is simply leasing the lines, hardware, and bandwidth. It is because of this early work conducted by so many different entities that internet faxing has become affordable.

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