For
people that have heavy duty fax requirements, there are dedicated
laser fax machines. Typically these machines offer faster speed
(33,600 bps), JBIG data compression which reduces transmission
time and phone costs, large paper trays, more memory, fast print
engines and in some cases a second phone line.
Internet faxing with a business fax machine
Internet faxing allows an one machine to send faxes over the Internet to either another Internet enabled fax machine, or directly to an email address. The main advantage of this technology is the low cost of transmission, since the fax does not travel over long distance telephone lines. This is appealing for companies sending a lot of international faxes. It should be noted that a potential pitfall to internet faxing is that some internet fax machines are unable to confirm whether or not the fax has actually reached the destination. An alternative to internet fax technology is scan to email, offered by most multifunctional printers.
Network fax machine
In recent years the ability to link the fax machine to the corporate network has become prevalent. Also known as LAN fax, your company server acts like a shared, multi-line fax machine where users can send faxes right from their PCs, just as if they had their own fax card, modem and telephone line. The benefit of LAN fax is the reduced cost of telephone lines and extra hardware, along with central management of all faxing capabilities. (Note that there still may be a requirement for a separate fax machine for transmitting original documents with signatures.)
For inbound receipt of faxes, more sophisticated installations
can provide each person with their own fax folder within their
email. This can be accomplished via several methods: having separate
DIDs, direct inward dialing, for each person (the best and most
foolproof method), T.30 subaddressing if the sending fax has this
feature, or DTMF dialing by the sender.
