According to the IDC and Pete Davidson Consulting, LAN-based production (service bureau) fax is expected to keep growing at around 3% to 5% annually between 2001 and 2005. Fax machine unit sales are growing too: about 3% to 5% a year.

Reports to the contrary, fax is clearly still very much alive. In fact, not only is fax still growing in a range of established niches - it's finding new ones.

From V.17 to V.34

Perhaps the most important innovation in circuit-switched fax since 1997 has been the move from the V.17 (14.4 Kbps) standard to V.34 (33.6 Kbps). V.34 is accompanied by V.8 fast handshaking between devices, which can cut call-setup and session-management time by one-third. Thus, a fax document that takes one minute to transmit with a 14.4 Kbps fax device can now be sent in less than 30 seconds.

In order for V.34 to work, of course, fax machines at both ends of the line must support it. Large enterprises started moving to V.34 after its ratification in 1997, but it's taken a while for all of the vendors to come on board, as it were. For example, the V.17-based TR-114 fax board, long an industry workhorse and market-leading product from Brooktrout (Needham, MA - 781-449-4100, www.brooktrout.com), has been joined by the V.34-based TR1034 board.

"Basically, we see V.34 fax technology as the basis for the next generation of intelligent fax boards," says Frank Potocnik, Brooktrout's Senior Market Development Manager for Unified Communications. "The TR1034 delivers fast 33.6Kbps fax transmission speeds, up to 30 fax channels per board, and features an onboard T1/E1 interface." In May 2002, Copia International was one of the first fax server software vendors to release a V.34 faxing engine that works with the TR1034.

COLOR FAX

In 1991, Sharp (Mahwah, NJ - 201-529-8200, www.sharp-usa.com) unveiled a color fax machine that cost $13,500. It wasn't a huge success. Aside from the high price, an interoperable color fax standard (ITU-T.30E) didn't appear until 1997. Interestingly, with the development of cheap color inkjet printing engines and the rise of high bandwidth V.34 document transmission, $200 multifunction devices for SOHOs from HP (Palo Alto, CA - 650-857-1501, www.hp.com) and Canon (Tokyo, Japan - 3-3758-2111, www.canon.com) soon appeared capable of printing, scanning, copying and faxing in color. Mainstream fax vendors suddenly realized they had some catching up to do. Companies such as HP responded by producing different types of color printing modules, aimed at various market segments from entry-level to high-end.

Since color faxing involves JPEG compression and decompression and "color space" conversion from RGB to a standard such as CIELAB, it suddenly occurred to manufacturers that color fax machines could easily be used to print out image files directly from digital cameras, without having to first download them to a PC. Some models simply accept memory cards straight from the camera. And of course, images can be sent from one color fax machine to another.

Second-generation Java-based color fax machines being developed by companies such as Matsushita Graphic Communication Systems (Osaka, Japan - www.panasonic.co.jp/mgcs/) will also be capable of color document communications via the Internet - you'll be able to upload or download color images directly to-or-from web pages, or send a document to any email address you specify (when the recipient is a PC, the mail sent by the Internet fax can be opened by the recipient user with ordinary mail software).

FAX over IP

Perhaps Internet color fax machines will help revive the fax-over-IP (FoIP) market, which went into the doldrums around 1998-1999, long before the dot-com bubble burst. Low telco rates make FoIP look too difficult to deploy for only limited ROI.

FoIP technology relies upon the T.37 "store-and-forward" and/or T.38 "real-time" protocols. Since T.38 faxes are "real-time" in nature, they behave very much like a conventional faxes, while T.37 resembles email. TIFF files are inserted into email as attachments and sent to a server that periodically polls its own email account, reads the fax recipient from information in the email header, then forwards the TIFFs to him or her. Ironically, one major FoIP-capable vendor (Captaris) sends Adobe Acrobat (PDF files) in conventional emails instead of T.37 TIFF transmissions.

FoIP protocols are used extensively by ISP networks when a subscriber wants a service where faxes are directed to a specific phone number. The faxes must be sent back to the main ISP servers, where the subscriber's message database dwells. T.38 is often used to move the fax back to the ISP servers, with the premiere product in this area being Commetrex' TerminatingT38 suite of licensed source code libraries. These are used either in embedded gateway systems or run on host servers.

Here are some fax players and their new wares:

ACCPAC INTERNATIONAL

ACCPAC (Pleasanton, CA - 800-945-8007, www.accpac.com), a subsidiary of Computer Associates Inter-national, has just released the ACCPAC Messenger, a network-based UC server software product for SMBs. The software installs on an ordinary server equipped with a multiline voice board. The system in turn connects to the company phone system and data network.

Jonathan Blackwell, VP and Technical Product Analyst for ACCPAC Messaging Products, says: "It's a platform that will have multiple products that run on top of it. It's designed to deliver low-cost voicemail, call center and fax management and it integrates with standard email and business apps. We can use Brooktrout or Dialogic Intel boards, it runs on the Cisco AVVID architecture, and it can integrate with digital and analog switches."

ACCPAC Messenger and its simple interface lets businesses quickly design and manage their phone and fax system, including call routing trees, company and personal greetings, call transfers to internal or offsite workers, and fax routing to network printers, scanners, email, and other business apps.

Plus, ACCPAC Messenger's Internet Fax Service eliminates the need for onsite fax hardware or additional phone lines. The service provides users with a local or toll-free number to receive faxes into email, and the ability to "print-to-fax" from Windows applications like Word or Excel. Fax broadcasting is supported, as is fax on demand. ACCPAC Messenger integrates with telephone systems from Avaya, Nortel, NEC, Mitel, Siemens, and Panasonic.

CALL SCIENCES

Call Sciences' (Edison, NJ - 732-494-5800, www.callsciences.com) Enhanced Communications is a unified messaging service that consolidates the capabilities of all of your communications devices onto one seamless platform, so users have consistent, one-number access for different types of messages - voicemail, faxes, and emails. The service is compatible with PDAs and other handheld data devices.