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Comment by varenc | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't calling a phone number rely on a chain of service providers as well? Your fax probably needs to be bounced through several companies and some of that infrastructure ends up shared with internet infra anyway.

Though I agree that for many end users sending a fax is easier and simpler, but that seems mostly because of experience and familiarity.

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The big differences to me are that faxes don't need an "account" to send/receive files, the machines are simpler and cheaper, they have far fewer intermediary technical and user issues, and their network is way more reliable. If you depend on sending and receiving documents, faxes are light-years more reliable and less complicated than, say, e-mail.

Can you count the number of times an internet connection has gone down for a business, compared to the number of times the PSTN has gone down? Unless a truck takes out a utility pole, there's no contest. And the lack of obstructions for user access removes a whole slew of other issues.

> The big differences to me are that faxes don't need an "account" to send/receive files, the machines are simpler and cheaper, they have far fewer intermediary technical and user issues, and their network is way more reliable. If you depend on sending and receiving documents, faxes are light-years more reliable and less complicated than, say, e-mail.

You most definitely need an "account" with your telephony provider in order to receive anything.

I meant regarding e-mail (or any other internet file transfer service). Your e-mail account, and that of your recipient, are accounts used to authorize access. If either you or your recipient lose account access, you can not send and receive files. This happens all the time, like when your corporate ID gets locked for no reason, or a user forgets their password, or some other problem occurs.

Faxes require no such accounts. Just plug the machine in to a phone line and send a document.

More accurately, faxes do not support accounts. Faxes assume that a single phone line has a single user, like machines on computer networks in the bad old days. The modern equivalent would be using a single email account for the entire company and posting the password around the office.

>>Can you count the number of times an internet connection has gone down for a business, compared to the number of times the PSTN has gone down?

I will give you that point, but counter with this: fax machines rely on printers, which IME are one of the least reliable pieces of technology. A printer being jammed/broken is far more common than losing internet connectivity.

And business people nowadays can check their email on a cellphone. Even if they don't, the email will still be there when they get back online. A mangled fax or one received when the power's out can be permanently lost.

I recently had to send some things by fax (and actually do have a fax machine), and had trouble with the remote fax server disconnecting in the middle. I finally figured out part of the problem was it did not like the direction I was feeding the pages. But there was no worthwhile error message, and the connection only errored out several pages in.

Also the quality is kind of crap. One of the pages was unreadable, so after having sent the "official" version as a fax (they accepted faxed raised-seal documents as originals), I had to follow up with a higher quality color scan anyway.

Still your point about it being P2P, relying on just the physical network and its addressing is appreciated and duly noted.

A fax confirmation sheet can be shown in court as proof that the other party received the document in some cases. Email is a lot trickier.

In fact, it is possible for telephony providers to recognize fax signals, decode them themselves and just send the decoded bits over the connection, then re-generate the fax sounds at the other end. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.38 .

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