The online fax business is growing rapidly, and new web-based fax companies are being
established on a regular basis. If you’re interested in signing up for an online fax service but
don’t know where to begin, we’ll help you sort through your options and guide you to the service
that works best for your unique business needs.
Online faxing is basically the same as traditional faxing. It’s a way for one party to instantly
and securely send a document through a phone line to another party. It’s essentially a cross
between offline faxing and email, but online faxing is a more secure alternative to email, and it
uses phone numbers rather than email addresses.
In most online faxing interactions, either the sender or the receiver uses an actual fax
machine. For example, you might use a fax machine to send a document to a person who receives it
through an online service, or you may use an online service to receive a document from someone
using a machine.
The online fax service is basically an intermediary. You sign up, you get a fax number for
receiving documents, and they provide you with an easy web-based interface for sending faxes.
What are the benefits of online
faxing?
nline faxing is better than using a traditional fax machine in a few ways, including:
It’s more reliable. Traditional fax machines are limited by busy signals,
paper jams, ink outages, and so on. With online faxing, these issues are gone.
It’s faster. Being able to send and receive faxes from your computer
is much easier and quicker than having to deal with a live machine.
It’s cheaper: Most online fax services are cheaper than the cost of a
phone line dedicated to a fax machine.
It’s secure: The best online fax services use encryption technology that
is just as secure as sending documents directly through a phone line.
It saves paper: The cost and environmental benefits of saving paper are
obvious. Over months, using a virtual fax service can save lots of trees.
Internet fax services review: Standard
features
There’s a group of about five or six online fax services that
currently set the standard for the business. All of these services have a few things in
common, for example:
Sub-$10 monthly rates
A free-trial period
No start-up fee
300-500 monthly pages
Overage page fees of under $0.10
Good, 24-hour customer service
Secure encryption technology
Automatic retries following busy signals
If you find a service that doesn’t offer all of these things, then you might want to keep
looking. Also, keep in mind that the competition in this business is likely to heat up in the
coming years, so there may be some great deals in the near future.
There’s a group of about five or six online fax services that
currently set the standard for the business. All of these services have a few things in
common, for example:
