The fax of internet life

Some ISPs believe that fax will be the next killer application for the internet. Frank Booty dials in to find out if he can cut his fax bills.

Up until now faxing has traditionally been a relatively costly and the internet. Frank Booty dials in to find out if he can cut his fax bills. mainly unmanaged means of delivering documents. However, users have grown fond of the immediacy of fax and as such are unwilling to give it up despite the growth of e-mail. But now solutions are starting to appear that bridge the gap between e-mail and fax. They use the internet to send documents from the desktop to any fax machine connected to the public telephone network. This is substantially cheaper than using the public telecoms network and brings fax into line with e-mail.

It has been claimed that UK companies could cut up to 52 per cent off their fax costs by taking advantage of internet fax. Using these solutions provides an integrated environment for creating, distributing and managing fax documents. It also reduces the costs associated with phone lines and the maintenance of fax equipment.

So how does it work? Users can create a custom fax from within a standard application such as Microsoft Word. These can be sent to an individual recipient, or to large distribution lists, from a fax address book through an ISP gateway. The gateway decides where the PoP (Point of Presence) nearest to the fax number is and switches the fax message onto the public telephone network at that location. Notification of the status of each fax sent is delivered to the sender by e-mail. Home office and mobile users can use their favourite web browser to access the ISP's web fax feature and send a fax directly from the browser.

"The rapid take-up of e-mail shows how the internet is an ideal communications medium for sending documents cheaply and efficiently," said Robert Offley, sales and marketing director at ISP PSINet. "Now companies can add the fax to their set of internet tools and save considerable time, money and energy. Many organisations have established internet connections, or will have very soon. These companies want to maximise the investment and a fax service is a good example of how we're adding value to their internet connection."

A case for cost-saving

PSINet markets its InternetPaper service, which is now available in the UK, US, Japan, Canada and mainland Europe. Available as part of all PSINet internet connections, InternetPaper costs #100 for registration and offers a range of monthly usage plans, starting at #50 a month. Cost savings vary from country to country, depending on existing regional phone rates, but users can expect to see substantial savings when faxing internationally. (see box)

The software for InternetPaper is available for Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and NT. PSInet claims that it can easily be integrated with users' existing network fax solutions.

UUNet also offers an internet fax service. Last summer at the launch of its global internet fax service, John Sidgmore, UUNet's CEO, said he believed that fax would be the next killer application for the internet.

The UUFAX service features technology jointly developed by UUNet, Open Port Technology and Ascend Communications. It uses over 100 specialised fax processors in business centres throughout the US, Europe and Asia.

Ascend modified its dial-up access concentrators to support outbound calls, and to recognise incoming faxes for hand-off to the fax processors.

These utilise Open Port's modular software - also deployed in several other fax solutions - which has the scalability to support the extensive UUNet backbone. Included within UUFAX is Open Port's customer premise equipment (CPE) software which enables a business to combine its desktop, e-mail and standalone fax traffic through one common internet connection.

Customers can also integrate their fax and internet traffic over a single internet connection. For smaller businesses, UUFAX supports standalone fax machines without changes in operator procedures.

UUFAX supports a range of fax transmission capabilities including: sending faxes from standalone fax machines to other fax machines or desktop PCs, sending faxes from desktop-to-desktop and desktop-to-standalone fax equipment, and sending e-mail and e-mail attachments as faxes. It also supports broadcast faxing.

By sending/receiving communications through a single UUNet-installed CPE device, customers have a means for monitoring and controlling their fax traffic. End users can access the UUFAX website to track the status of their faxes at any time. Corporate administrators also have access through the UUFAX CPE to reports and analysis of fax usage across the enterprise and at department level.

Security and service

The company claims that to date other ISPs have offered fax services on a limited geographic basis or by reselling fax service bureau offerings.

UUNet points out that it deploys UUFAX over its own global private internet backbone. As faxes never touch another ISP's network and do not go through the general internet, UUFAX customers theoretically get greater security, reliability and quality of service.

First customer trials were with financial institution Bear, Stearns & Co, oil company Chevron and SourceFinder.

What about the costs? With no volume commitment, UUFAX costs between 35 to 55 per cent less than telephony-based faxing. With volume commitments, much greater savings are available. Savings over fax service bureaux, which tend to offer a more comparable feature set, are even more dramatic.

The company quotes: UUFAXes sent within the US cost 10 cents per minute (7.5 cents per page). Typical long distance business rates within the US are 15 cents per minute, while fax service bureaux typically charge 65 cents per page. UUFAXes from the US to the UK cost 19 cents per minute (14 cents a page). Compare that with typical international long distance rates of 45 cents a minute, and service bureau pricing of over $1 per page.

UUFAX needs a UUNet connection, which can range from an analog dial line to a leased line connection - internet connection charges start at $30 per month. The company points out all prices quoted are for "quantity one" service with no volume commitments. Significant discounts kick in for volume use.

Unified messaging

Internet faxing is still relatively new with many companies still trialling their services.

I-way is one ISP which is gearing up to launch services. "We expect to be launching a service in mid-summer. However the key here is you need to be using unified messaging systems," said John Rance, director of I-way. "That involves a bundle of analog voice messaging, e-mail and fax.

Transmitting faxes, and viewing them through an e-mail account, is the way to go. We are interested in business applications with an internet focus," he added

I-way recently re-focused exclusively on the business marketplace (although existing home users will continue to be supported). The company is now actively investigating a system built around servers from Virtual Plus, a UK organisation developing unified messaging systems.

"We took three years to develop our unified messaging service, which is being rolled out in the UK, US, Canada, South Africa and Europe," said Joanne Pitcher, Virtual Plus operations manager. "With many people now offering fax services over the internet, we expect traffic volumes to increase significantly in the next five to 10 years when IP voice telephony takes off."

Back at I-way, Rance is interested in expanding the messaging potential of the internet. "We're also interested in short messaging services, where you can read e-mails on mobile phones, for example," he said.

Such facilities are offered through the likes of CompuServe, where the service is supplied by Jfax of Chicago. Jfax supplies unified messaging services for CompuServe, AOL, Eudora, Fujitsu and Telos.

Jfax users get a local, private phone number in one or more cities on the jfax.com global network (in Europe, that's London, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich, Paris and Zurich). People send faxes and voice messages to that number, and Jfax instantly forwards the messages to a user's inbox.

Once the Jfax phone number has been activated, users download free software and can listen, view, store and re-route all messages.

For a one-time set-up fee of $15 and then $12.50 a month, users get the Jfax phone number in any city on the company's global network and up to 200 incoming fax pages and voice messages. Users can also save up to 80 per cent on outbound messaging over traditional telephone costs. Jfax starts users out with a credit of $2 toward sending outbound messages.

Use more than this and your credit card details held on file will be charged $10 as a deposit toward future use. The company claims that it can set up new phone numbers within 10 minutes of sign-up.

Growth opportunity

Bob Quillin, vice president of marketing for Cupertino-based Packeteer, echoes UUNet's Sidgmore's comments on fax being the next killer application for the internet: "Fax over IP represents a significant growth opportunity.

Fax differs from voice over IP in that it's not realtime and the associated latency issues are not so great. There are still some quality of service issues. Our focus is QoS over IP and we're talking with larger carriers with IP gateways and ISPs seeking to expand their service offerings."

It's quite obvious that voice, fax and data traffic are converging. With its huge investments in PSTN infrastructure, the question has to be asked what is the biggest player in the UK telecoms market, namely BT, doing about this convergence? Obviously BT has a presence in the ISP market with BT Internet, but according to the company a service called BT Magic is being trialled in its labs. This will allow users to pick up faxes from a website.

Currently internet calls account for up to 10 per cent of the 75 million local calls BT handles annually. By 2003, BT reckons the number of data calls will outstrip voice traffic. Since 1993, the number of e-mail messages has jumped from a negligible figure to 10 million a day. And BT is now investing #1bn a year for new data capacity. It had to happen.