Fax standards

January 25th, 2011

Let’s continue our fax machine invention article. Now we will take a look at fax standards. The first time fax data transmission attempted unification was in 1966 by Electionic Industries Alliance (EIA) with the so called “Group 1″ standard. It is used only for analog lines and it was the first step of making compatibility between fax machines from different manufacturers. In these days the speed was not very high. It was taking between 4 and 6 minutes to transmit a single fax page! The resolution was 96 vertical scan lines per inch. The standard scan speed of the “Group 1″ machines was 180 lines per minute. The frequency of the signal was between 1300Hz (white color) up to 1900Hz (black color).

The biggest manufacturers in the USA did not comply well with the “Group 1″ standard inthe beginning. Some of them even used different schemes for modulation of the signal. That way the transmission of fax data between USA and the rest of the world (where the standard was adopted better at this time) was practically impossible. The “Group 1″ fax standard is now outdated and these machines have not been manufactured for some time.

In 1978 the international organization “Comite Consultatif International de Telegraphique et Telephonique” (CCITT), which is now known as ITU, defined the “Group 2″ standard which was immediately adopted by all fax machine manufacturers. The analog transmission speed was doubled at almost the same resolution as “Group 1″ – 100 scan lines per inch. These machines were used for a long time, however in the last two decades their usage is decreasing significantly since the digital phone lines are actively replacing analog ones.

The modern fax machines era came with the ITU-T Recommendation T.4 in 1980 with the digital phone line standard called “Group 3″. The speed of transmission can be from 9600 up to 33600 bits per second with which the required time for transmission of one fax page is decreased significantly. There are different variants available for resolutions; however most of the fax machines are using two settings:

  • Standard mode: 203×98 dots per inch;
  • Fine mode: 209×196 dots per inch.

There is also a “superfine” or “ultrafine” mode available on some machines.  Most of the fax machines today use the “Group 3″ standard and usually use the fine mode as default resolution.

The “Group 4″ standard came in 1984. This standard is primarily designed for digital ISDN lines but today it is also very popular for VoIP lines. It provides capabilities for much higher transfer rate of up to 64 kilobits per second. In “Group 4″ the available resolutions can be higher – up to 400×600 dots per inch (this is comparable to the quality of regular printers). If a “Group 4″ machine transmits to a “Group 3″ machine (or vice versa), the “Group 4″ machine will “fall back” to a “Group 3 compatibility mode” and of course both the resolution and the transfer rate will be lower.

How are the different fax machines “understanding” each other? During the fax-modem “handshake” (this happens before the transmission of the actual fax letter) the fax machines are exchanging information between each other. First they tell exchange information about the standards that they are following. If one of the machines is using a higher Group standard, it should be able to “fall” to “compatibility mode” in order to conform with the machine which is using the older (lower) standard. After that the machines must define what transfer rate will be used. The rule is that they will use “the highest transfer rate of the slower machine”. That way the transfer rate will be the maximum possible in which both machines can work properly. If there are some issues (like distorted phone signal or low bandwidth, the connection may fail to continue properly. If that happens the sender or the recipient of the fax letter should retry with lowering the transfer rate of the fax machine. That way he will simulate a slower machine and this will give more time for the machines to “clear” the distortions from the phone signal.

For “Group 3″ machines today the speed shouldn’t be slower than 14400 bits per second. Since the v34bis protocol modems are the most popular today, usually the transfer rate is always at the maximum of 33600 bits per second. It should be lowered manually on one of the negotiating machines only if there are issues with the phone line. The same applies for “Group 4″ machines which suffer from insufficient bandwidth.

With the Internet era many alternative variants started to be available like the “Fax over IP” for example. Probably the most popular method for transmitting faxes today is the “Internet fax” and the “fax to e-mail” services in particular. The Internet fax services are fully compatible with the Group 2, 3 and 4 standards; however the faxes are transmitted through a single server with many lines and fax modems in rack and that way the users do not have to buy and maintain the expensive fax machine and dedicated phone/ISDN line. To use a “fax to e-mail” service all you need to have is an Internet connection and an e-mail account. Additional comfor is obtained by knowing that no paper is used – all messages are transferred electronically. That way the user has an option to choose which of the received fax letters are important and which are not and they can print “hard copies” only for the documents they need. Therefore the Internet faxing is much more “environment friendly” than regular fax machines.

References:
Some information is rephrased from the Wikipedia “Fax article”

Posted in Internet Fax | 1 Comment »

Unityfax secure storage

January 16th, 2011

The primarily target of the Internet fax is to function as a “fax to e-mail” service. This not only brings ecological benefits by skipping the tons of wasted paper but also leads to much easier management of the incoming faxes. You can easily separate all your faxes to different folders of your e-mail client or you can download them as files to your local computer. That way the organization of data is much simpler than searching through hundreds of lists of paper.

Choosing the Internet fax service to replace the regular “paper fax” gives many benefits but also brings new responsibilities. What about the security of your faxes? It’s not impossible; however very rare situation to really loose a paper fax. On the other side the electronic faxes can be deleted and lost with a single press on the delete button on the keyboard. A crash on the mail exchange server in your office can lead to loosing all your e-mails, including the faxes. This means that keeping a secure backup of your faxes is a must!

Making secure backups of faxes can be very expensive for small office and requires qualified staff for management of the servers. For that reason people usually keep their faxes both on their e-mail servers and as local copies on their hard drive. That way the faxes are kept in two locations and the information can be recovered even if one of the computer systems crashes. Unityfax.com is a leading fax to e-mail provider that helps you to improve your backups one step further. There is an option for keeping all recent faxes on a secure location called “secure storage”. This is a special password protected area on servers with high quality hardware and maintained by qualified administrators in the Unityfax data-center. These faxes can be easily accessed from the users (after authentication) through the web with a browser. It has a web interface which helps you to browse, download and read your faxes sorted in folders by date:

It provides a useful “Search” function which helps you to find faxes. For flexibility you are also able to manage the names of the folders, add new folders and move faxes from one folder to another:

The secure storage area on the Unityfax servers is also a very flexible alternative way to manage faxes; however we would like to seriously note that it is primarily intended to be a “backup of recent faxes” and not a “permanent storage”. Even if you choose to use the secure storage instead of e-mail (this is not unusual and many Unityfax customers prefer it) you must know that you should keep a copy of your faxes in your e-mail or/and on your local hard drive too! There are different short and long term storage solutions that allow you to recover your faxes from the secure website; however in all of them you should know – older faxes are permanently removed from the server. The current (by January 2011) secure storage options are the following:

  1. 30 days – This is the default selection which is automatically included with all fax accounts. The faxes received in the last 30 days can be recovered through the website. Faxes older than 30 days are removed;
  2. 6 months – This is the most popular option that gives 6 months of secure storage.  If you need more than 30 days of storage, but long term storage is not necessary, this is your best option.  You can recover any faxes that you have received in the last 180 days;
  3. 12 months – The faxes from the last 365 days can be recovered with this option. This can be useful for organizations which maintain their documentation on an annual basis;
  4. 24 months – For those who require long term secure storage and want to ensure their faxes are recoverable for 2 years after they have been received, this is the best option.

Everyone’s requirements are slightly different and the secure storage choices have been designed to accommodate these needs. Of course there is also an option to disable the secure storage. That way the faxes will be sent only by e-mail and there will be no files stored on the Unityfax servers at all. This can be done from the administrative control panel with a simple check-box:

As you can see the Unityfax secure storage option is a flexible way for both backup and fax management. It is very easy to use and it can be accessed from different locations with a simple web browser. This is an additional benefit for people who do not use web-based e-mails and may not have access to their e-mail all the time.

Posted in Fax To Email | 4 Comments »

Sending fax from Outlook

January 11th, 2011

UPDATE: Starting from October 2011 Unityfax is using a new domain for sending faxes – RouteFax.com. The article below references to “FaxORama.com”, which is our old domain. The article is still valid as the sending procedure remains the same – the only difference is that the new domain should be used from now on.

Sending a fax letter by e-mail – is that easy enough? We know that using the regular fax machine is simple – you must prepare a document, print it, then put the printed paper list in the fax machine, dial the number of the recipient, hit “send” and wait to see on the machine display if it is delivered properly. What about the “e-faxes”? Are they complicated or not?

We will now show an example of sending a fax letter by e-mail. This process is invariant of the e-mail client (the software which you use to send e-mail) but for the example purpose we will show how it is done using “Outlook Express”. This program is coming for free with Windows and it is one of the popular e-mail clients. Sending using other clients (like the web software clients from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) is not much different. In our example the e-fax service will be from unityfax.com and it’s interface for sending faxes.

First open your e-mail client and click on the “Create e-mail” button to compose a new message:

After that you must type the e-mail address where the message will be sent. The required format is <number>@faxorama.com (where you replace <number> with the actual 10 digits number of the recipient). In our example case we want to fax a letter to 954736318, so the e-mail address is 954736318@faxorama.com:

Whatever you write in the body of the e-mail message will be sent to the recipient as a fax page. If the body of the e-mail message is left blank, then this page will not be sent. The next step is to include the actual fax letter in the e-mail message. What you must do is to attach the file that needs to be faxed. Click on the “Attach file” button and choose the file that you wish to fax out (in our example we will use a PDF file):

The other available formats are DOC, DOCX (Word files), BMP, TIFF, JPG and other images. If you want more than one document to be faxed, then repeat with attaching a second file. Finally, when you are ready to send the fax letter, you have to hit the “Send” button:

After sending your e-mail message (fax letter) is delivered to the fax server. What is left to do now is to verify it and approve it. For that reason you will receive an e-mail from support@faxorama.com with the following content:

Now all you have to do is to click on the link in the e-mail to approve the sending (this is important security measure which will prevent spammers). Your default web browser will open and you will see a webpage similar to this one:

On this page you see the fax letter id (it can be used for eventual tracking from the support department). From now on all you have to do is to wait. In no longer than few minutes (depending on the fax letter size) you will receive an e-mail back with status report. Normally (if everything was sent properly) it will state that your fax letter is successfully delivered to the recipient:

That’s it! The fax letter is succesfuly sent! Sending of fax letters by e-mail is simple and can be done from any computer at any time. The e-mail software that composes the letter does not matter – it can be desktop or web e-mail client or even a smartphone/GSM. Therefore the sending is very flexible and mobile and it does not require that you should be physically in your office.

Posted in Send Fax | 4 Comments »

Fax To Email For Going Green In Your Office

November 22nd, 2010

Fax to email is one of the simplest ways that a modern office can take steps toward going green–and for both business and ecological reasons, it makes sense to do so. More and more customers look for so-called “green” companies, and while many ecologically safe practices require enormous investment, fax to email is decidedly different.

As its name implies, a fax to email service (sometimes referred to simply as Internet fax) takes incoming faxes and converts them into digital documents that can be read in a user’s email. Common types of digital documents, for instance Microsoft Word documents, can be sent over the Internet as outgoing faxes. There are few limitations to an Internet fax service. They can handle far more incoming faxes than traditional lines since they’re not reliant on the same decades-old technology. Outgoing faxes can be sent to other Internet fax services or directly to traditional machines. What’s more, documents sent over the Internet can be easily printed out when necessary. This allows businesses to keep a hard copy of important documents while instantly weeding out and eliminating junk faxes.

The ecological benefits of an Internet fax service are significant. Businesses that use Internet fax save an enormous amount of paper and ink. This translates to savings for the business as well as the environment. A fax to email service is therefore one of the few ecologically safe “green” improvements that a business can make that actually saves money in the long run.

Unlike traditional services, a fax to email service requires no machine other than a user’s existing computer or Smartphone. This is where the real ecological savings come in, as traditional machines use a tremendous amount of plastic, precious metals, grease, and oil in their production. Eventually, Internet fax services could completely wipe out the need for new machines, which could greatly reduce the carbon footprint of businesses everywhere.

Internet fax’s environmental benefits are quite significant, and businesses can make a lot of money from going green in the 21st century. More and more businesses operate completely electronically, and a fax to email service is a great way to become paperless. Businesses that are paperless can promote in new ways, and can often gain a great number of customers by submitting their names to green business directories and ecological foundations. Green businesses can apply for special government programs and certifications that can allow them to find more clients.

There are dozens of major benefits to using a fax to email service, from the services’ ease of use and reliability to their low costs. However, the environmental benefits are driving a tremendous number of customers to Internet fax technology. By cutting the amount of paper, ink, and eliminating physical machines from offices, Internet fax services can help businesses become green while cutting the cost of each document sent and received.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brandi_Armstrong

Posted in Fax To Email, Internet Fax, Send Fax | 1 Comment »

FaxOrama.com

August 24th, 2010

What is FaxOrama?

FaxOrama is a free Web faxing service that allows you to send a free fax anywhere in the United States or Canada. Premium service is provided by UnityFax and it supports features like sending and receiving faxes via email.

How does FaxOrama work?

FaxOrama is very simple to use. Type in the sender’s (that would be you) name, company, fax number, and email. If you don’t have a fax number, you can enter in your phone number and it works just fine (I tried it myself). Next, you’ll need to enter in the receiver’s information: name, company, and fax number. You WILL need the person’s fax number that you’re sending this to; a phone number just won’t do for the receiving number.

How do I actually send a document with FaxOrama?

Right under where you input the Sender and Receiver information, you’ll see a space where you can select the file from your computer to upload to FaxOrama to send (click the “Browse” button and find where the file is located on your computer). You’ll have to enter in a confirmation code after you’ve uploaded the file; this is just to make sure you’re not a robot.

Free Service

Unless you fax lots of documents, the FaxOrama Free Service is what you’ll want to go with. Here’s what you get with the Free Service:

•Free!
•NO Ad on the cover page
•Fax 1 document – maximum 5 pages
•Maximum 2 free faxes per day

If this fits your needs, hit the “Send Free Fax Now” button and you’re all set.

UnityFax offers premium service. If you like the convenience of FaxOrama, but need more than the Free Service, you can check out UnityFax.com.

Why should I use it?

FaxOrama fills the need for people like me who don’t fax documents more than once or twice every few months. It’s a convenient (and free!) way to get paperwork where it needs to go.

Posted in Send Fax | 11 Comments »

Email Fax Service

July 7th, 2010

When I first started working for myself I had run into a couple problems with having all of the necessary tools to run a business the way that I knew I would have to. I started my own product business online and almost daily I would get requests asking me for my fax number so I could get log information faxed to me directly. Well the problem there was I didn’t actually own my own fax machine.

I talked to a couple of my friends and one of them asked me if I had ever heard of a service that would allow you to use a fax number online. Of course I hadn’t heard of something like this before so I thought I would start doing some research. I eventually found an email fax service and thought this couldn’t be better.

Having a fax machine is really something that every business should have especially as early as they can get one. However wouldn’t it be really great if you didn’t have to use a fax machine at all and instead could simply fax people through using an online service such as your email?

I think that would be more than fantastic and after discovering that there were several places I could turn to for applications and software that would allow me to do this I was quite excited.

I quickly learned of the sites that would allow you to create software that would actually allow you to get faxes that people needed to send to you sent directly to your email address so you could acquire them on your own time. This is in fact quite an amazing piece of software and something I found great for my business.

If you can relate to my situation at all than perhaps an email fax service can help your business too.

Internet faxing plans are available for just pennies a day and give you advanced faxing capability that is not available from a typical fax machine. With one of these send fax online services, you can send a fax directly from email, from your secure online account, or many programs already on your computer.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Caressa_Waechter

Posted in Fax Email, Fax To Email, Internet Fax, Send Fax | No Comments »

Mad Cat Attacks Fax Machine!!

March 3rd, 2010

Posted in Fax Email, Fax To Email, Internet Fax, Send Fax | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »