Reason: Because there is no equivalent for TCP/IP that "just works".
The fax use case is: a businessperson needs to walk to a machine, lay a stack of 50 sheets down, punch in an address and let the machine do the rest. Oh, so you say some scanners/copiers can email? Let's go over the problems with email.
- dealing with attachments
- attachment filetype; no enforceable standard by the recipient
- inboxes overflowing
- smtp servers rejecting messages over a certain unknown size
- mailserver administration
- chews through Internet bandwidth; no built-in throttling
- spam
- spam false positives, dropped messages
- no ability to reliably confirm delivery
- recipient has to print document, for full fax simulation
I'm actually amazed there has been no Internet standard that has emerged for this: pushing a large document in some standard format to an Internet-connected client computer (laptop or desktop, not dedicated server) for immediate viewing/printing. The cynic in me says the anti -P2P movement had a lot to do with it, since a P2P file transfer is about as close as we have to fax functionality (albeit with some problems of its own). There are obviously many ways to cobble together HTTP, FTP, SFTP, XMPP, etc. to imitate this use case, but none really come close to the plug-it-in-and-hit-start ease of fax machines.
In my experience, analog fax has been neither problem-free nor spam-free, even with a solid fax machine over POTS. Feed errors, pages turned the wrong way, machine running out of memory, feed or print jams, poor quality, power loss, etc, have all contributed towards fax headaches.
Email works significantly better than fax: it just appears to have more problems due to volume of electronic mail.
You make it sound like faxes are infallible. Every time I've had to send somebody one, we've had to cycle through several iterations before it actually worked - Ah, looks like I need to dial 9 to get an outside line. Oh, your fax machine isn't switched on right now? Still nothing? Ok, read me your fax number again one more time. Oh crap, I put the documents in upside down...
Sure. But you send faxes how often? A few times a year? If you're sending faxes all the time and you know how to do it, they're mostly pretty reliable. This is especially true within narrow communities of companies who use it all the time (like the legal and financial sectors).
The fax use case is: a businessperson needs to walk to a machine, lay a stack of 50 sheets down, punch in an address and let the machine do the rest. Oh, so you say some scanners/copiers can email? Let's go over the problems with email.
- dealing with attachments
- attachment filetype; no enforceable standard by the recipient
- inboxes overflowing
- smtp servers rejecting messages over a certain unknown size
- mailserver administration
- chews through Internet bandwidth; no built-in throttling
- spam
- spam false positives, dropped messages
- no ability to reliably confirm delivery
- recipient has to print document, for full fax simulation
I'm actually amazed there has been no Internet standard that has emerged for this: pushing a large document in some standard format to an Internet-connected client computer (laptop or desktop, not dedicated server) for immediate viewing/printing. The cynic in me says the anti -P2P movement had a lot to do with it, since a P2P file transfer is about as close as we have to fax functionality (albeit with some problems of its own). There are obviously many ways to cobble together HTTP, FTP, SFTP, XMPP, etc. to imitate this use case, but none really come close to the plug-it-in-and-hit-start ease of fax machines.