UK Regulator Ofcom Sounds Death Knell of the Fax Machine (ft.com) 81
The British communications regulator has sounded the death knell of the fax machine, just over 30 years after it revolutionised office life. From a report: Ofcom said on Tuesday it had started the process to scrap legislation compelling BT, the former state-owned monopoly, to provide dedicated landlines for the devices at affordable prices. The facsimile machine, first commercialised by Xerox in 1964, became a ubiquitous feature of offices around the world from the late 1980s, but has since been displaced by a combination of email, scanners, cloud and instant messaging services. The old technology works by processing the contents of a fixed graphic image, transmitting it through the landline via audio-frequency tones, which are then received by another fax machine, interpreted and reconstructed into a printed replica of the original. "As digital technology and broadband services have developed, the fax machine has been overtaken by email and document sharing software that offer the same or better functionality," Ofcom said in a statement. "We're now consulting on changes to telecoms rules that could see the fax machine become a thing of the past."
Why do you need a dedicated line to run a fax? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't get why there was ever legislation mandating cheap land line service for a fax.
Regardless, eliminating isn't "the death knell of the fax machine".
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The legislation would have been to ensure that the price charged for putting in a fax line was standardised, and you wouldn't have to pay additional costs based upon whether there were existing infrastructure and capacity (the Universal Service Obligation).
Back when digital PBXs were becoming prevalent, they usually would not work with fax machines, and specific analogue lines were generally required if someone needed a fax machine - I'm not sure if this is still the case with fax over non-copper based line
Legacy Applications (Score:5, Informative)
Up until fairly recently, in the US at least, certain legal documents were required to be sent via fax. For instance, if you were sending an official filing to a court house, or a sales contract for real estate to a title company, it had to be done via fax. These were due to official legal rules involving insurance companies, official court rules, etc...
I'd imagine it's a similar situation in the UK. Some governmental branch or official process *had* to be done via fax, until an acceptable on-line substitute was settled on.
For a somewhat parallel example, up until a few years ago the FDA required certain documents to be sent to them on-line using a custom Java application running on Java 1.4. They've since updated it... to Java 7.
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FWIW, if an end-user downloads Java from the official site today, the default download is still only Java 8.
Why is Java 8 recommended?
Java.com is for end users who need Java for running applications on desktops and laptops. Java 8 integrates with your operating system to run separately installed Java applications. If you were asked to install Java to run a desktop application, it’s most likely you need Java 8.
https://www.java.com/en/download/why-java-8-recommended.html [java.com]
Java (Score:2)
Sure, but the "updated" tool was released sometime around 2018, three years after Java 7 was EOLed for public support. You *could* run it on Java 8, but that's not an officially supported configuration per their tech support guidelines.
What makes it funny is that the tool is not a complicated one. The JAR is a few hundred K, along with several dozens of megabytes of open source framework JARs. You fill out a form (that uses native Java controls so it's an ugly one) aim a file picker at a directory, it zips
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There's still a niche in the US for medical documents, I assume because of HIPAA requirements. The theory seems to be that scanned documents sent via email are sent unencrypted and wind up being stored unencrypted on email servers. That makes them more vulnerable to hacking than faxes, which are only vulnerable during transmission. It's OK to send scanned documents via encrypted channels, which most big medical systems do internally. We don't have good encrypted communications channels between health sy
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Not that sales were not important. It was that you had an accurate copy of the order nearly instantly.
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It was part of the universal service mandate that they got when they were privatized. They have to provide a phone line to all areas of the country, capable of supporting fax machines, on request. Otherwise anyone living in rural areas would have been quickly abandoned due to the cost of serving them.
By the way, here's a non paywall version of TFA: https://www.ft.com/content/2da... [ft.com]
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It's the death knell for sending data modulated into audio frequency tones. Not the death knell for sending digital images, just an acknowledgement that there are much better ways to send digital images. Fax machines were not noise free; much like copying machines, the image degraded with each copy.
Why is this the death knell for it? I agree there are better ways, but I can still run my fax machine when I need to using my home FIOS phone.
So I don't see how this proposed change kills the technology. You can still use it if you want/need to.
Mind what fax is for (Score:1)
"Better ways" in what way?
Fax isn't about images, it's about documents. And in some ways that still beats sending by email hands down. The legal protections and the automatic delivery receipt, for one. Email falls far short on both.
Oh, and receiving a digital image and sending it again, without printing on thermal paper and scanning again, sidesteps quite a bit of degradation. Send it over digital pathways with proper fax support, and no degradation at all.
Over here in the Netherlands the incumbent telco
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Crap, copied the wrong link. That non paywalled article: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%... [12ft.io]
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I don't get why there was ever legislation mandating cheap land line service for a fax.
Because when the government granted monopoly enters the market, unless you have price controls in place that entity will dominate and destroy any form of competition.
Many services still have legally mandated provision and price controls. It avoids those situations you hear about in the USA where people can live within a few km of the city centre of a massive multi-million population city and get told "hahahah f-you, pay me $25k if you want this connection".
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Next up (Score:2, Informative)
...should be copper POTS alarm lines. Our line of business has strict insurance requirements. Among them requires independent copper POTS alarm lines. In addition to dedicated Internet and cellular radio as backup routes for our alarm panels. I know that US-based telcos have been gradually phasing out copper. Mainly by pricing it out of practicality. Even with some contract promos, we are paying around $70/month per copper line. Archaic requirements that are a PITA to include in my annual budget. Of course
Re:Next up (Score:5, Informative)
You know what's interesting about POTS? When the electricity went out, it still worked. The same cannot be said for modern IP services.
Complain all you want, POTS was about as close to 100% uptime as one could get.
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Agreed. I go back a-ways and appreciate the upside of this for sure. The thing is, when it comes to 100% uptime for POTS, that's really only if you are picking up an analog phone to make a call. If you are connecting to any equipment (e.g. - fax machine, alarm panel, etc.) then unless you have a fueled generator then no electricity also means no service from a practicality standpoint.
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You don't necessarily need a fueled generator; a battery backup is probably sufficient for an alarm system. If it's critical to life safety (e.g. a fire alarm) it is probably legally required to have a backup that will last at least a predefined time. If you're going to pay for a landline for redundancy, you should also be willing to pay for backup power.
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Unfortunately businesses like Qwest^H^H^H^H^HCenturylink^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLumen seem to be intentionally letting their copper rot in the ground. A twisted-pair analog 1FB line went from being the most reliable (albeit slowest) connection to the least reliable connection.
As someone who was involved in maintaining three to four analog lines per site over around a hundred sites, we were very, very interested in other solutions for life-safety as the copper phone lines just stopped working and the field te
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It can work both ways: July 2020 in Yeovil a fire in the phone exchange took out all power for part of the town for a good 10 hours as well as the POTS. Mobile service was OK ...
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You know what's interesting about POTS? When the electricity went out, it still worked. The same cannot be said for modern IP services.
Complain all you want, POTS was about as close to 100% uptime as one could get.
My mobile tends to work when my electricity is out, and so does our fibre (which has battery backup). The whole POTS still works argument doesn't really hold, it's completely dependent on the same battery backup that is provided with a variety of other services offered to you.
Incidentally though it was fun watching my friend back in the day replacing a frayed cable on the end of an old phone. He stripped the wires with his teeth... without unplugging the cable. He won't be doing that again. 48V may be compl
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The problem with cellular for things like alarms is that the standards are changing every decade or so, and older versions are getting abandoned. Like an old 2G iPhone, it won't work any more because most (if not all) carriers in the US have discontinued 2G service. The same thing will happen with 3G soon.
It's likely not a simple case of replacing the cellular modem dongle either, it will be some proprietary contraption that the manufacturer has little interest in supporting when you could simply upgrade to
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elevator analog phone lines still on the books? (Score:2)
elevator analog phone lines still on the books?
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Yep. To pass inspection. Although that could just patch over to an ATA, and doesn't have to be independent copper POTS. Other than that and the alarm lines, we have one vendor who's located outside of the US (over in Europe). We still have to fax them orders. In 2022. And regardless of the T.38 gyrations and other VoIP config tweaks I couldn't get consistent faxing unless we stick the fax on copper POTS. Fun times.
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At some point, it all turns back to analog, because humans are
Not quite... (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA,
That's the middle-aged technology we all came to know and love. The original technology, though, was analog (1880--1970's era). First used on radios for "wireless newspapers," it's still used to broadcast marine weather charts on HF.
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has the full history.
-JS
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they still have an black and white TV licence (Score:2)
they still have an black and white TV licence
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AFAIK, (Score:2)
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Because of doctors and lawyers, there will always be fax machines.
They seem to think there's some kind of security/non-repudiation. But I can go dig up a 1980's fax-modem from my garage and fake any kind of fax I want.
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They seem to think there's some kind of security/non-repudiation.
The security lies in the document at the other end. A pharmacy can shred a faxed prescription once it's been filled. A doctor can lock a file in a filing cabinet.
If they're emailed there's all kinds of complexity around securing the attachment, and managing secure online encrypted document repositories are still technically challenging for many.
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My take on this:
The security concerns of using the fax are well understood: anyone can snoop on the line, but the lines are (were?) well defined, and ownership regulated. The machine itself is mostly irrelevant.
The internet and general computers, not so much. Anyone can snoop on the line, the data can be routed through who knows where, using routers backdoored by the wrong people (ZTE/ZyXEL), mandating use of crypto on the end machines, which brings a whole new class of vulnerabilities.
But searching for FAX
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There is still a difference between electronic fax services and email: the fax is a transient transmission while email stays on the server (and possibly intermediate servers) indefinitely. Unless it's end-to-end encrypted, that email on the server is a big vulnerability the fax just doesn't have.
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How do you know there is a physical fax machine that prints the fax to paper. How do you know there isn't a server with a fax modem that stores it to a file, or even forwards it to email?
How do you know the telco does not record calls - the fax could be reconstructed from a recording. A fax will traverse multiple telco networks just the same as email, the difference is that fax will never be encrypted in transit whereas email could be and there are ways to ensure that it is.
Retrieving an email from a server
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Basically agreed. The larger medical practices I deal with will have secure online portals for messaging and test reports. The smaller, older ones are still postal-mail-or-fax, and the staff act boggled/dismissive if I ask about any other options. Which seems amazing in 2022.
Send photos (Score:2)
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What will replace it? (Score:3)
"As digital technology and broadband services have developed, the fax machine has been overtaken by email and document sharing software that offer the same or better functionality,"
Fax has two crucial things these technologies lack: perceived privacy, and perceived authenticity.
The reason doctors and lawyers still use fax is because a signed fax is as good as watching the person sign the paper.
Email can't fill this role without an unprecedented adoption of cryptography.
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I thought there was a way to fax direct from a computer as well and skip the print.
Yeah. Decades ago. You could get a modem card and s/w drivers which would convert your document to TIFF, allow you to select a fax number from a contacts list and send it.
There are also e-mail to fax and fax to e-mail services that will handle these functions on a remote server with no hardware at your end.
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Electronic signatures on PDF are a thing now, and E-sign seems to be accepted similarly to a physical signature.
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Fax has two crucial things these technologies lack: perceived privacy, and perceived authenticity.
The reason doctors and lawyers still use fax is because a signed fax is as good as watching the person sign the paper.
Email can't fill this role without an unprecedented adoption of cryptography.
"Perceived" only by people with no expertise in technology. Meanwhile, the financial industry has moved on to digital documents with electronic signatures. No more having to hunt down an old fax machine to legally transmit a signed document to your brokerage. All it would take is the will to drag doctors and eventually even lawyers into the new century too.
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The word perceived is a good caveat. Maybe we should educate people on the shortcomings of fax (you have no idea who is standing at the machine at the other end), and the benefits of digital signatures.
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I have had companies email me a form, ask me to print it, sign it, scan it, and email it back. The same perceived privacy and authenticity!
Doctors (Score:1)
The mind reels...
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But that FAX number might not actually be a fax machine on a traditional phone line. More then likely, it's a VoIP appliance feeding the fax machine (which still requires a 'phone number' even if its virtual). Or a fax to e-mail service, which requires no hardware at the recipients end.
The idea that important documents have to go over the PSTN [wikipedia.org] for security purposes is laughable by now.
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My favorite fax memory (Score:2)
Fakkusu (Score:2)
State owned (Score:2)
UK agencies are notorious for running ancient tech. They are still running Windows XP on many critical systems. The only reason MI5 hasn't been hacked is Russia and China can't find any ALGOL 58 programmers.
Just over 30 years? What? (Score:2)
Just over 30 years would put us ~1990. I'm pretty sure that the Fax "revolutionized the office life" a bit earlier that that.
Faxing has been around for ages, but it really started to take-off in the 70's, and absolutely exploded in the 80's.
Yes, I still have a fax number. Toll-free, even. It gets occasional use.
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Not going to happen as long as courts recognize them as legal primary documents.
are they kidding me? (Score:2)
"first commercialised by Xerox in 1964"
FAX was around as a Western Union service as far back as the late 40s/early 50s... and likely earlier (30s maybe?)
The telephone driven copier based system that Xerox came out with was just an extension of that.
Somewhere, some poor, aggrieved IT guy... (Score:3)
Already been sounded (Score:2)
BT have been telling us for years that the digital network switchover in 2025 will kill faxes.
We use them for communicating with various government departments.
30 years? (Score:2)
We'll fox 'em! (Score:1)