The conventional method for sending faxes over phone lines(pstn).

Fax machine? Phone line? Fax machine

A fax machine is an electronic instrument composed of a printer, a modem and a scanner. It transmits info in the form of pulses thru a telephone line to a recipient, normally another fax machine, which then transforms these impulses into images, and prints them on paper.

The conventional method requires a phone line, and only one fax may be connected to send or receive at a time. Then came email fax phone.

Internet fax

Since there’s no telephone connection charge when sending a fax over the world wide web, the cost of sending faxes is covered entirely by the limited line internet connection fee. The recipient machine must similarly be compatible with internet fax.

Hardcopy is converted to tiff or pdf info and attached to an e-mail in mime format. Then, taking vantage of a connection to the office lan, info is sent thru tcp/ip directly to any internet fax on the intranet or internet.

Ip fax and ip address relay

Ip fax transmits info over an office intranet from a networked multifunctional device to the ip address of another.

Taking vantage of an conventional lan / wan infrastructure, ip fax does away with expensive connection and transmission fees.

Similarly, ip fax doesn’t require a committed server or make use of the office mail server.IP relay forwards a multifunctional device to transmit to a local computer G3 fax.

Email fax phone

As modems became widely used in personal computers, the computer was used to send faxes directly. Rather than introductory printing a hard copy to be then sent thru fax machine, a document could now be printed directly to the software fax, then sent thru the computer’s modem. Receiving faxes was accomplished similarly.

Email? Phone line? Fax machine

Fax machine? Phone line? Computer

A disfavor of receiving faxes this way is that the computer has to be turned on and running the fax software to receive any faxes.