Fax or to call it its full name, facsimile is an easy way of sending printed pages over the phone line it’s actually quite old technology. When you send a fax the recipient will receive the fax almost instantly (or their fax machine will anyway!).

It does cost money to send a fax, however it is much cheaper than an equivalent phone call. Modern day fax machines are equipped with 56Kbps modems, and so transmission of documents is very quick. You can send several letter size pages in under a minute, you try transmitting the same amount of information over the phone, it’s nigh on impossible.

Fax also prevents confusion, when talking on the phone people can misunderstand what you are saying and get the wrong end of the stick. By sending a fax the person has a written copy of what you said to them in front of them which has a time and date printed at the top. This really helps avoid arguments over when you actually told someone to do something.

If you wanted to send documents before fax was around then you had to use the postal service, post is obviously a lot slower than using a fax machine. Post does however have its advantages, the original document can be sent, and so there are no problems with unreadable documents.

The disadvantage of a using a fax is that many people do not check their fax machine on a daily basis, so even though the machine has the fax the person you want to read it hasn’t even seen it. Also you could have the problem of an over efficient receptionist throwing away important faxes before you get chance to read them. With a phone call you can make sure the person knows what you want to tell them.

Fax does have several modern day alternatives, the most popular being email. It is completely free to send an email, compared to a fax which does cost a small amount of money. Email is also instant, but the main disadvantage of email is that it’s difficult to send already printed documents by it. To send a printed document you would have to scan the document and send it as an image attachment, which is very time consuming. Also I have the problem of some of my emails occasionally disappearing into cyberspace without a trace!

Fax is the most efficient and best way of sending printed documents to someone. It is very useful in business. Fax will never become obsolete, in fact people are making many improvements to it, it is now possible to send faxes over the internet, and modern day fax machines have the capability of sending in colour.