Fax to the future: what took so long?
As a temp in 1982 I spent a lot of my day loading huge sheaves of paper, a sheet at a time, into a huge machine for Mellon Bank (not sure if the title is 100% correct) in the City of London. The machine was probably a Xerox Ethernet-enabled 8000 which was, as the term du jour went in the 1980s, state of the art. I remembered being as amazed as we all were by the original iPhone ad when I first grasped what the fax did.
There was also a lot of talk in the 80s and 90s about the paperless office – a term coined in Business Week in 1975, apparently. Fax certainly helped prevent it.
Before email was ubiquitous, fax transformed office communications and was often used for big-money transactions with tight deadlines like house sales or football transfers, apparently, as they provided a prefect facsimile (hence the abbreviated name) of the original contracts.
One of my fondest memories is sending a fax for someone who kept sheep and has missed the posting deadline to submit documents to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF – as it was then). Having sent the fax, he became very agitated. It turned out that he somehow expected the sheets to travel down the wire and was upset they were still in the machine’s out tray. I did not embark on an explanation of modified Huffman code.
Bye bye fax
Amazing that all this time the US the universal service obligation (USO) has been in place for fax but not even a basic level of broadband. USO designed to make sure phone services are available to people across the UK at an affordable price. There are two designated USO telecoms providers – the two former fixed monopolies, BT and KCOM (in the Hull area only).
Now Ofcom is consulting on changes to telecoms rules that will mean telecoms providers will no longer be required to provide fax services under the USO, which was set out in 2003, when fax machines were more prevalent and email and instant messaging were less widely used.
Ofcom is inviting comments by 1 December on its planned implementation of this change and expects to publish a statement in early 2023.