When it was announced today that INTERNET TELEPHONY Magazine had awarded its Product of the Year Award to a fax-to-email gateway service, I did a double-take. All of the fantastic new VoIP technologies and services and products out there, and they choose fax, that crummy, outdated method of transferring low-quality digital copies of paper documents? I checked the date on the press release: maybe it was an old one from a decade ago that had somehow gotten reprinted? Nope, the date was right. The self-proclaimed “VoIP Authority Since 1998™” has given its highest annual accolades to MyFax.

This strikes me like Car & Driver putting a horse-cart fixed up with a 4-cylinder engine on its “5 Best Cars” list, or Mr. Blackwell deciding that layered neon socks and big hair are perfectly fine fashion choices these days. Fax is, for all intents and purposes, a pointless, annoying technology that should have been made obsolete by the internet a half-decade ago. The fastest fax machines out there still take six seconds per page to send. I can send a 250-page PDF file to someone via email in two seconds. Top-of-the-line fax machines use 28.8 modems — just like the one you threw out years ago because it was way too slow.

Some people say that fax is the best way to send forms with signatures on them, since there currently aren’t good, widely-adopted ways to digitally sign documents. Fax is insecure. I can paste a scrap of paper with someone else’s signature onto a document and fax that just as easily as I could sign my own name, and the recipient won’t know the difference.

Seriously, how often do you use a fax machine? And when you do, are you really doing anything that you couldn’t do much faster and more easily on the internet? Is it easier for you to fill out a paper form by hand, take it to a fax machine, dial someone’s number, and put the page through the machine than it is for you to go to a website, fill in the form, and click a button?

The last time I used a fax machine was when I kept getting annoying fax messages in my voicemail, and finally forwarded them to a fax machine only to discover that they were just spam from a local mattress store. Even when I worked in an office with a fax machine nearby (in the mid-90s), 90% of the messages that showed up were local restaurants faxing us their daily menus and local businesses sending us unwanted advertisements. What a great use of paper and ink!

With the huge, booming popularity of Vonage and Skype, the awesome VoIP gadgets released by Linksys, Netgear and others, INTERNET TELEPHONY seriously couldn’t find a better innovation than a fax service? C’mon. The rest of us have moved into the 21st century. It’s time to get rid of the fax machine.

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