Online Fax or FoIP ? What’s the Difference?

October 27, 2010
by Gregory A. Sanders for toponlinefax.net

Confused by what you read or hear about online fax and fax over IP?  You’re not alone.  Communications technology changes at an incredible rate.  New products and new concepts being introduced every day.  If you feel confused, you’re in good company.

FAX: How and Why – Fax, short for facsimile ( “a copy”), became popular in the 1970’s as a way to send documents without mailing them.  These machines revolutionized office procedures allowing business to move ahead more rapidly rather than having to wait on physical courier delivery or the postal service.

In the old days, if you wanted to send a fax, you used a fax machine which was attached to a plain old telephone service (POTS) line.  It was the same sort of line you used for your voice calls.  If the fax was going to someone outside your dialing area, you paid long-distance fees for sending it.

Why Fax at all? – There were two main reasons Fax technology was so widely adopted.  First was convenience.  The ease and speed with which a document could be moved from one office to another was irresistible to business and government agencies.  What could take days before was now doable in minutes.

The second reason fax technology was so widely adopted was security.  Sensitive documents could be transmitted from one place to another with the reasonable expectation that what arrived at the receiving end was an exact duplicate of what had been put in the machine at the sending end.  Therefore, signatures, stamps and such were considered as valid on the fax as they were on the original.

Today an added consideration is that traditional faxing is also point-to-point, meaning there is no middle-man, only the sender and the receiver.  The document does not stop anywhere between.  No copies are created during the transmission.  That cannot be said of online faxing.

Enter ‘Internet Protocol’ – In 1983 the world changed forever with the advent of the first TCP/IP network.  Since that time, the Internet Protocol (the IP part of TCP/IP) has become the dominant digital communications protocol.  The world quickly moved from sending simple text messages to streaming video and voice over IP networks.  Fundamentally, this was a switch from analog to digital.  This switch is still happening, and any system that relied on the presence of an analog signal carrier, like fax machines do, has either been redesigned to use digital transmission (TCP/IP, etc), or is facing extinction.

The Struggle to Keep Faxing – Companies found cost savings by eliminating their old analog phone lines and adopting voice over IP for their telephony needs.  Unfortunately, fax machines do not work well with VoIP.  Because faxing is ingrained in the culture and practice of business, a real need for a solution emerged.  Two main solutions have evolved.

Online Fax – The first solution to this problem came in the form of online faxing.  This is a service offered by a remote provider who receives your document in one of many formats and uses the internet to transmit it to your intended destination.  This system eliminates the fax machine completely, using instead a printer driver on your computer, or a scanner, or simply an uploaded copy of the file from your hard drive.  You save on hardware, paper, toner and long-distance costs.  Your documents are stored on someone else’s server somewhere in the cloud.

Fax over IP (FoIP) – The fax machine is not dead.  The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) established a protocol in 1998 called T.38 which allows fax machines to use IP networks to communicate with each other.  Companies like ShoreTel and 8×8 offer T.38 compliant services which allows their customers to enjoy the benefits of traditional faxing without the overhead of POTS lines and long-distance charges.  Normally the standard fax machine is plugged into an adapter which is then connected to the IP network.  The adapter uses the T.38 protocol to manage the connection.

Which is Better, Online Fax or FoIP? – As usual the answer is, it depends.  If you want the secure end-to-end, point-to-point document transmission of traditional fax, then FoIP is what you want.  If you are only concerned with sending documents from your desktop to remote fax machines without actually having a fax machine, then online fax will suit your needs.

Both May Be Best – With the current push toward Unified Communications taking center stage, the best solution for fax in the modern age is to have both capabilities.  It is certainly possible for your company to use both online fax and FoIP to your advantage, leveraging the best qualities of both methods for maximum benefit.

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