From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Subject: Re: Future of fax?
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 92 21:35:41 GMT
Keywords: fax,e-mail,networks

Mariusz@fbits.ttank.com (Mariusz Stanczak) writes:

> Doug, I agree with your statement that FAX is an "'intermediate
> technology'", but its drawbacks are somewhat remedied by the
> trend of putting FAX capabilities into the new crop of fast
> modems (V.32bis+14.4 FAX) (applicable to any computer system)
> or directly on the PC bus (applicable to PCs).  This fact makes
> your main argument against FAX as being a paper to paper medium
> much weaker (makes for a great sales pitch though ;-)) and it puts
> FAX on par with "e-mail" transmission of graphics data.

I agree with your statement that some FAX drawbacks are partially
addressed in new hardware solutions. So far as I know, however,
faxmodems are not usable on unix (correct me if I'm wrong, I'd like to
use one!), require cumbersome software to display or interpret incoming
data, can't readily be turned into ascii for input into a word
processor, and basically are only suitable for printing. So you end up
with a paper-to-paper medium still, in many essential elements. 

On the other hand, the closer that FAX comes to e-mail in capability and
presentation, the better e-mail looks by comparison! That's because
e-mail is vastly cheaper.

FAX's major advantage over e-mail today is the very fact that it is
paper-to-paper in a world that has been oriented toward paper
communication since 400 B.C. That world has also been heavily into
photo-copying for at least 20 years. FAX is basically 'remote photo
copy' - and fits in very nicely with the technologies of the past.

Ditching the paper and putting everything into electronic form only is a
much larger change, and will of necessity proceed more slowly.

But FAX's major psychological and cultural value, that it is
paper-based, is its major technical weakness, and the source of most
inefficiency. As communicators come to depend on computers more, and
become more and more cost-conscious, e-mail has more and more
advantages. 

There is a 'critical mass' in any communications technology, whether it
be telephone, FAX, or E-Mail - that point where there are enough people
using it that there develops an expectation that the others have access.

We expect people to have phone numbers. We are starting to expect people
to have FAX numbers. We are not yet usually expecting people to have
e-mail addresses. But it is starting.

The Internet alone is growing at the rate of 1000 hosts per day! The
number of people with e-mail access is rapidly increasing. If the point
of critical mass has not yet been reached, it will be reached.

Given the choice of e-mail or FAX or voice telephone or post or courier
to dispatch a message to someone (assuming both sides have access to all
of these), which is going to be chosen for what, when?

Since 80% of FAXed messages (according to a stat i read somewhere) are
typed text, and since e-mail is almost always better for typed text than
FAX is (and it is certainly hugely cheaper), my guess would be that 80%
of current FAX traffic will migrate to e-mail. As it does, the
importance of having a FAX machine at all will dwindle for many current
users whose use is ENTIRELY typed text. This will result in FAX falling
below the critical mass, I suspect, such that it will continue only in
very specialized applications where graphics, rather than text,
represents the main use. Over time computer handling of graphics will
likely supplant that technology.

I will make no predictions on how many years that will take.

I am old enough to have learned to type on a brand new manual typewriter
at the time when electric typewriters were beginning to penetrate the
typewriter market. Photocopying was rarely done, and few people had easy
access to that technology. Carbon paper was used a lot, along with
spirit duplicators. I'm talking early 1960s. In that 30 year period
enormous technological changes have happened in the realm of business
communication, and those changes are continuing to be rapid, even
accelerating. 

All these changes have taken place within the living memory of people
who haven't yet hit the ripe old age of 40!

Where will the next few decades take us?

I think we will see rapid growth in e-mail and internetworking that will
make e-mail virtually instant throughout most of the developed world,
and almost free. Meanwhile FAX has to be expensive, even if you don't
use paper, because it consumes so much more bandwidth on the public
switched telephone network.

Managers, noting that e-mail is cheaper, will encourage employees to use
it, instead of FAX, wherever it is feasible and suitable. That will not
be ALL communications by any means, but I expect it will be a majority.

If we think into the future about these things we can see that FAX, when
removed from a paper-centric model, becomes a way of transmitting a
computer generated picture (even when it is a picture of a typed page)
from one computer to another over a telephone line. It does that at 9600
BAUD paying (long distnace) by the unit of time needed to do the job on
an acoustic channel with (on a good day) a 3000 Hz bandwidth. Internet
links usually start at 9600 and range on up to the sky. Even if one
thinks of sending the exact same data via direct-dial modem as compared
to Internet high bandwidth links, the internet transmission will
generally be cheaper. At this point, one is essentially e-mailing one's FAX!

Only where the document formatting is vital (font, type-size,
page-breaks etc.) would a picture of the page be preferable to the
actual ascii. Given that the latter is maybe 100 times cheaper than the
former, and the former takes a lot more work, I think there is reason to
speculate that the latter will become quite popular!

Now when I use the word FAX, I am speaking about the transmission of
pictures between computers over the phone line using acoustic MODulation
and DEModulation. I do not include all transmissions of pictures.

Fundamentally I think that the use of modems for data transmission of
any kind over phone lines will fall off in favour of cheaper,
higher-bandwidth means of communication such as those typical of the
Internet. Where no other means exists, modems (FAX or DATA) are just
great for getting it there. Where other means exist, these are usually
deemed 'more great' and overall, more economical.

When we compare the sending of 'pictures' of a typed page vs sending the
actuall ascii text, I think we'll find that very rarely is the 'picture'
seriously preferred (I didn't say *never*) over the ascii content. And
we'll always find it more expensive to send the picture than the raw
ascii.

So I think that no matter how you cook it, whether you look at FAX as
the transmission of a picture of a page, rather than the acsii of the
page, or whether you look at FAX as modem direct-dial communication in
contrast with wide-bandwidth networking, 'FAX' is an intermediate
technology likely to fade in time.

=Doug

----------------------------------------------------------------------
UUCP: uunet.ca!uuisis.isis.org!doug                Voice: 613-722-4724
DNS:  doug@uuisis.isis.org, doug@uuisis.UUCP, doug@isishq.fidonet.org
                      SKAN Communications Inc
      POST: P.0. Box 3041, Stn C., Ottawa, K1Y 4J3, CANADA 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Xref: sparky comp.society.futures:225 comp.society.development:101