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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

Faxing provides some advantages that can't be easily matched by competing communications tech: it's solid tech that works well, it can operate without requiring access to a computer network, it's cheap, it's dead easy to use, etc.

I'm not surprised to hear that it is growing in popularity. I think that we'll find an increasing number of other "antique" technologies that will find a resurgence for the same reasons.

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im not sure about dead easy to use? i have figured out how to use all the tech devices including old school iptv cameras, smart cash registers and connecting thermal receipt printers but the fax machine is absolutely the shittiest gadget i have had to deal with in my life despite being shown how to operate it multiple times.

The people who say faxes are easier than email are like the old mechanics who complain about how EFI is complicated and carbs were so much simpler.

It's not actually any better, just a lot of people learned how to use it 20 years ago and don't want to learn anything new because they're wastes of space.

This is just not true as a blanket statement. I am as cutting-edge tech-wise as anybody (it is my industry, after all), but that doesn't blind me to the fact that there do, in fact, exist use cases for which the fax is the best solution.

Everyone has a camera on a device that can send emails. Unless the internet went down and for some reason the phone system still worked, I can't think of any scenario where fax is better than emailing photos.

I can think of a few. For instance, the internet is not available to a lot of people. For those people, the alternative to faxing is snail mail. Also, not everyone has an internet-connected device that also has a camera. I know it's hard to believe, but it's true.

Also, even when you have both an internet connection and a camera, there remain numerous possible reasons why you may not want to use the internet to send certain things.

I'm certainly not saying that everyone should start faxing, but I totally understand why there may be a substantial minority for whom it makes sense at least from time to time.

Simple scenario: you need to transmit multiple legible pages of black and white text, in that case a fax machine is far superior to anything you can do with a phone camera.

The fax protocol includes a strong "read receipt" type mechanism that the machines can't ignore. "Did you get the last page?" "Yes, no bad lines."

Legally, this is interesting because it doesn't exist in email. You had the machines agree that the complete document was sent and was received. You will certainly find that it other transfer protocols, but not email, where the machines don't talk to each other directly.

It is very dangerous to hold third party medical records in everyone's devices. It is also not integrated with the systems required to record care, so you still need to build a custom integration.

I'd say the opposite. Probably 99% of people in this thread has never sent a fax.

Not that solid. "POTS" lines only really exist at the last mile to customers, otherwise its all digital/VoIP. Plenty of places faxing will fail do to "line quality" issues. Fax only continues to work at all because the infrastructure takes great pains to keep them working.

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