[Asterisk-Users] OT: fax obsoleted? Was: Re: Fax via email
On 2004.06.11 20:47 Steve Underwood wrote: The last info I got from a large FAX server is about a year old. It seems after several years of nothing much changing, FAX has suddenly taken a step up - kind of sad it should improve now it is obsolete :-) Fax was only partially obsoleted. Users, developers, and manufacturers alike all "foresaw" the end of fax with the coming of the internet age. They were only partially right. In the old days, before the internet became ubiquitous, fax was used quite extensively for document retrieval. So if you had document-information that you wanted to make available to others then it was popular to put them up on a "fax-on-demand" service, and the inquirer would either receive the documents to their fax machine via polling, or by "fax back". This usage of fax has almost completely been obsoleted by the internet browser and by PDF. In the old days everyone who was anyone had a fax-on-demand service. These days that has been obsoleted by the website. So yes, receiver-initiated document exchange has largely been replaced by websites. There were also plenty of examples where people would use fax as a means for small, somewhat unimportant, message communication - the equivalent of today's e-mail. Obviously e-mail has obsoleted this. However, fax is still very much alive and healthy in the area of imaged document exchange where the website or e-mail use would not be appropriate - i.e., where the sender wants to initiate the document exchange and the document is in a more-than-text form or image of some kind (applications, completed applications, handwriting, etc.). Furthermore, I don't see this usage of fax going away any time soon. Indeed, technology seems to be providing better and better ways for this to continue, and I see no end to this sender-initiated use of fax. It's worth pointing out that e-mail works off of a different premise than fax, and therefore cannot ever fully obsolete fax as it is. Unlike a website or fax, e-mail does not provide a mechanism for both the sender and the receiver to negotiate the communication and presentation of the document. E-mail permits the sender to send arbitrary filetypes with arbitrary formatting which the receiver may or may not be able to utilize easily. With a website the receiver should be aware of what they are clicking on, and with fax the receiver "capabilities" are communicated at the outset to the sender, and the sender must select tranmission parameters from those capabilites. Thus, with fax the sender can have a reasonably good degree of confidence that when the receiver sends the confirmation signal (MCF) that the receiver can view the document and that it appears to the receiver nearly exactly the same way as it appears to the sender. Not only can you not do this with e-mail, but furthermore with e-mail you only know that your outbound mail relay has accepted the mail or not. You do not have any reassurance that that the intended recipient actually did receive the message. And with the large amount of spam out there (very large in comparison to the quantity of junk faxes), spam filters, e-mail viruses, and such, e-mail really isn't a very good means to transmit these kinds of things. The fact that faxing has traditionally been done over POTS/PSTN lines is largely irrelevant, I think. Technology such as VoIP/FoIP is providing a means for fax to utilize the internet, and I only suspect to see an increase in the demand for fax-ready or fax-aware VoIP equipment or software. So fax modems may become obsoleted with the growth of the internet (it's going to take a long while for broadband to get to everyone with a fax application, though), but fax itself will still be there, running on things such as t38modem and your spandsp/rxfax/txfax. It's not going away. The 33.6k feature has certainly spread considerably in the last year or two. V.34-Fax is a smart thing for fax. Not only does it make the total communication take less time in most cases, but the fact that V.34 is used continuously throughout the session *without dropping and raising the carriers* makes it very stable. Without V.34-Fax you have to drop and raise the V.17/V.29/V.27 primary carrier and the V.21 control carrier frequently, and every time that happens there is a risk of losing synchronicity due to noise or timing problems. Fax machine manufacturers that want to have happy customers first make sure their products supports ECM (requires 64K RAM per line, so there is an actual hardware difference - not just firmware). Users won't know what this means, except that they'll get perfect faxes nearly every time. They'll eventually toss those cheap non-ECM fax machines when they have communication problems that are resolved when they go and buy a nicer ECM-supporting fax machine. They won't realize that it was ECM, they'll just know that the cheap fax machine didn't do as good
Re: [Asterisk-Users] OT: fax obsoleted? Was: Re: Fax via email
Hi. Just my $0.02 worth on this question. However, fax is still very much alive and healthy in the area of imaged document exchange where the website or e-mail use would not be appropriate - i.e., where the sender wants to initiate the document exchange and the document is in a more-than-text form or image of some kind (applications, completed applications, handwriting, etc.). Furthermore, I don't see this usage of fax going away any time soon. Indeed, technology seems to be providing better and better ways for this to continue, and I see no end to this sender-initiated use of fax. Agreed to some extent. However, most cases I think are somewhat overstated. I.e. people do fax applications back and forth in part because formats like MS Word don't necessarily guarantee layout. If PDF's were more commonly used, this would be more obsolete. But PDF producing and editing software is expensive, and you cannot exactly sign a PDF with your handwritten signature and send it back using standard hardware and software. On the other hand, there is a general perception that a signature on a fax will be somewhat better than a signature on an email from a legal perspective (IANAL, though). This is where I have seen the greatest continuation of the fax. It's worth pointing out that e-mail works off of a different premise than fax, and therefore cannot ever fully obsolete fax as it is. Unlike a website or fax, e-mail does not provide a mechanism for both the sender and the receiver to negotiate the communication and presentation of the document. E-mail permits the sender to send arbitrary filetypes with arbitrary formatting which the receiver may or may not be able to utilize easily. With a website the receiver should be aware of what they are clicking on, and with fax the receiver "capabilities" are communicated at the outset to the sender, and the sender must select tranmission parameters from those capabilites. Thus, with fax the sender can have a reasonably good degree of confidence that when the receiver sends the confirmation signal (MCF) that the receiver can view the document and that it appears to the receiver nearly exactly the same way as it appears to the sender. Not only can you not do this with e-mail, but furthermore with e-mail you only know that your outbound mail relay has accepted the mail or not. You do not have any reassurance that that the intended recipient actually did receive the message. And with the large amount of spam out there (very large in comparison to the quantity of junk faxes), spam filters, e-mail viruses, and such, e-mail really isn't a very good means to transmit these kinds of things. Fair enough. But I think the largest advantage I have seen you point out is the fact that email is packet-switched, and store-and-forward while the fax is connection-switched and delivered immediately or not at all. Therefore fax systems are fundamentally more reliable than email. But, let me ask you this. Suppose that I produced PDF forms which could be edited and then uploaded into a drop-box on my web site. This does not address some of the concerns about www/email vs fax, but it does address many of them. I suspect that you are right-- that fax services will eventually become merged with the internet, but we will need to see how that exactly occurs. Best Wishes, Chris Travers begin:vcard fn:Chris Travers n:Travers;Chris email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] x-mozilla-html:FALSE version:2.1 end:vcard
Re: [Asterisk-Users] OT: fax obsoleted? Was: Re: Fax via email
On 2004.06.14 09:31 Chris Travers wrote: But, let me ask you this. Suppose that I produced PDF forms which could be edited and then uploaded into a drop-box on my web site. This does not address some of the concerns about www/email vs fax, but it does address many of them. You creating a PDF, hanging it on your website, and then requiring the "recipient" to download the PDF does not constitute what I was referring to as "sender intitiated" communication. You're still requiring the recipient to take an active part in the communication. With fax, the participation of the recipient can be passive. So the scenario that you outline here is already web-only. We don't commonly see people asking "receipients" to poll faxes any more. But people are regularly instructed to visit websites. The non-obsoleted functionality of fax that I was describing was one where the sender initiates the communication and the recipient does nothing more but passive participation (i.e., has fax-receiving equipment on standby). Lee. ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] OT: fax obsoleted? Was: Re: Fax via email
Lee Howard wrote: On 2004.06.11 20:47 Steve Underwood wrote: The last info I got from a large FAX server is about a year old. It seems after several years of nothing much changing, FAX has suddenly taken a step up - kind of sad it should improve now it is obsolete :-) Fax was only partially obsoleted. Users, developers, and manufacturers alike all "foresaw" the end of fax with the coming of the internet age. They were only partially right. People always overestimate short term change, and underestimate long term change. This is normal. FAX is still on the way out. In the old days, before the internet became ubiquitous, fax was used quite extensively for document retrieval. So if you had document-information that you wanted to make available to others then it was popular to put them up on a "fax-on-demand" service, and the inquirer would either receive the documents to their fax machine via polling, or by "fax back". This usage of fax has almost completely been obsoleted by the internet browser and by PDF. In the old days everyone who was anyone had a fax-on-demand service. These days that has been obsoleted by the website. So yes, receiver-initiated document exchange has largely been replaced by websites. True. There were also plenty of examples where people would use fax as a means for small, somewhat unimportant, message communication - the equivalent of today's e-mail. Obviously e-mail has obsoleted this. True, although FAX is still found convenient for sketches and markup. However, fax is still very much alive and healthy in the area of imaged document exchange where the website or e-mail use would not be appropriate - i.e., where the sender wants to initiate the document exchange and the document is in a more-than-text form or image of some kind (applications, completed applications, handwriting, etc.). Furthermore, I don't see this usage of fax going away any time soon. Indeed, technology seems to be providing better and better ways for this to continue, and I see no end to this sender-initiated use of fax. Five years ago every office had a FAX machine. Have you noticed that a lot now do not? Also, for those that do, it is often a dusty machine in the corner that is rarely used? It's worth pointing out that e-mail works off of a different premise than fax, and therefore cannot ever fully obsolete fax as it is. Unlike a website or fax, e-mail does not provide a mechanism for both the sender and the receiver to negotiate the communication and presentation of the document. E-mail permits the sender to send arbitrary filetypes with arbitrary formatting which the receiver may or may not be able to utilize easily. With a website the receiver should be aware of what they are clicking on, and with fax the receiver "capabilities" are communicated at the outset to the sender, and the sender must select tranmission parameters from those capabilites. Thus, with fax the sender can have a reasonably good degree of confidence that when the receiver sends the confirmation signal (MCF) that the receiver can view the document and that it FAX provides zero confidence of communication. This is totally bogus. MCF means nothing at all. Paper jams, out of paper, FAXing into store and forward switches, etc. are just a few of the many reasons MCF is meaningless. They should all result in no MCF, but in the real world they don't. Even if the page comes out at my local FAX machine, unless I expecting the document and specifically collect it, it will go in the bin. All FAXes are now assumed to be junk mail, so secretaries no longer distribute them to people's desks (even if they have some idea which desk, which is frequently not the case). If they are multi-page, pages get lost and often only a partial FAX arrives. FAX has been my least reliable means of communication, and the most frustrating. appears to the receiver nearly exactly the same way as it appears to the sender. Not only can you not do this with e-mail, but furthermore with e-mail you only know that your outbound mail relay has accepted the mail or not. You do not have any reassurance that that the intended recipient actually did receive the message. And with the large amount of spam out there (very large in comparison to the quantity of junk faxes), spam filters, e-mail viruses, and such, e-mail really isn't a very good means to transmit these kinds of things. You have no idea where a FAX goes at all. Unless I know one is coming it will normally end up in the bin. An e-mail will always reach my desk, unless it gets mistaken as spam and dumped by filters. The fact that faxing has traditionally been done over POTS/PSTN lines is largely irrelevant, I think. Technology such as VoIP/FoIP is providing a means for fax to utilize the internet, and I only suspect to see an increase in the demand for fax-ready or fax-aware VoIP equipment or software. So fax modems may become obsoleted with th
