Because users create most documents with computers, they would prefer to avoid printing copies before faxing them. Also, fax costs devour an increasing portion of corporations' budgets. For fax technology to continue appealing to users in the next century, it needs some added spice to keep it in line with other communications methods. A small but growing number of ISPs offer fax services that let users send faxes over their private IP networks or the Internet. Fax over IP offers several advantages over traditional faxing.
Users can transmit faxes to E-mail addresses, joining the two primary communications technologies.
They can transmit documents from their PCs to fax machines without having to print them. Because ISPs do not pay a per-minute telco fee to transmit faxes over the Internet, savings may be passed on to customers, lowering their overall fax costs. Also, ISPs are adding extra services that may make faxing more efficient. Faxes sent over an IP network can travel faster than those sent through traditional fax machines because IP is not limited to analog transmission speeds slower than 56Kbps. According to Dataquest Inc., these advantages will cause the number of fax pages sent over IP networks to rise from 44 million pages in 1997 to 5.6 billion in the year 2000.