These requirements for faxing are becoming almost silly. Not only is the PSTN infrastructure in some areas so bad (40 year old corroded copper lines and such) that there are potential problems every time it rains, but incumbent carriers are trying to do everything they can to rip down what is left of the copper infrastructure. I don’t blame them as this makes practical and financial sense (remove copper phone lines, replace with fiber, offer data and voice through the fiber).

The dream is that the PSTN will be done away with entirely, with all traffic going through the internet.

A big problem is with fax machine manufacturers simply claiming that their machines “are not voip compatible” which is ridiculous, but the extra effort involved with getting faxes to work smoothly over voip can be a nightmare, and not something any vendor wants to be involved in supporting.

The result of this is clients with $15k fax machines reporting a myriad of problems, which the fax machine vendor claims that the only solution is a PSTN phone line for the machine, which in many areas is no longer possible due to the incumbent carrier phasing out the infrastructure or making it incredibly difficult to obtain.

There are a lot of “Efax” services whose purpose is to get around this problem by making the “fax” step just a transparent formality to appease regulatory constraints. Users can send an email with a specially formatted subject, then the “efax” company will actually “fax” the document specified in the email to a phone number owned by the efax company, which is then emailed to the intended receiver.