Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#81

Post by iandanforth » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:23 AM UTC

vegardx wrote: post #52

talles wrote: post #19

Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax?

Up until very recently my grandpa would use fax to send complaints to just about anything. It was about as stereotypical grumpy old man as you can imagine. He's a good person, just old-school formal when he writes. Comes of as a bit ... harsh. I thought it was going to end when they dismantled the analog network, and his fax machine with it, but somehow it just got worse. You see, on fax machines you rarely got spam,…

I can't wait to be old and have this much free time. I'm going to annoy the heck out of some youngsters.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#82

Post by jlgaddis » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #44

How about a service that can grab a document out of your Dropbox or other cloud account, then fax it for you? $10 for 50 pages could result in hella margins, if it's done right. (Everything done digitally, of course.) The account could even be managed from a phone app.

I don't recall which one but years ago I used one of the many email-to-FAX services.

I'd just attach a PDF to an email message addressed to @.example.com and I'd get the acknowledgement page back via e-mail (as another PDF) a few minutes later.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#83

Post by perl4ever » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:06 AM UTC

snarfy wrote: post #43

I give up and tell them I can't send a fax where I'm from. When they ask where I'm from, I tell them I'm from the year 2020.

The thing is, when I'm asked to send sensitive documents over unencrypted email or something, then I'd rather use the fax option. And I don't trust any internet gateway, I go to some local store with actual fax machines. I kinda sorta think of it as more secure than the internet, still?

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#84

Post by rubatuga » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:24 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #13

The fax requires a 56KHz channel which has not been used for mobile telephony since the 1980s (when AMPS and GSM were developed. Before then it was just a radio link through an operator). That’s why you can’t use a high speed modem either. Some gsm phones had the ability to transmit a fax but they actually used a different protocol to talk to a fax gateway. I never saw one of these in the wild. I haven’t been in that…

> The fax requires a 56KHz channel

This is quite wrong. I believe you are confusing Hz with bitrate, as the most advanced modems communicate at 56kbit/s using PCM. To clear it up, a regular phone line has a 4000Hz bandwidth. With digital lines, you require sampling at at least 8000Hz (Nyquist theorem). It's impossible to send a frequency above 4000Hz using this line. Each sample is considered to have 7 usable bits of data, giving it a capacity of 8000 * 7 = 56 kbit/s.

Most faxes are compatible with the T.30 standard, which doesn't acknowledge the usage of digital lines, and sends data using the older V.34 modem standard. This is either at 28kbit/s or 34kbit/s. This uses a method called Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), and a maximum baud rate of 3429 symbols per second. Since the centre frequency is set at 1959Hz, you won't have frequencies greater than the centre + bandwidth/2 = 1959 + 3429/2 = 3674Hz. You get 10 bits with each symbol, resulting in 3429 * 10 = 34 kbit/s.

Edit: Here's someone attempting to use the slowest supported T.30 standard, 300 bit/s, over his cell phone, and you can see it's not perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQqWHLZjOjA

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#85

Post by discordance » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:30 AM UTC

GlennS wrote: post #71

talles wrote: post #19

Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax?

I think this may be something that varies to region. I lived in the UK for 32 years and never sent a fax or even saw a fax machine outside of a museum. Couple of years ago I moved to Australia. Got a credit card for travel with Bankwest. In order to set up a direct debit to pay it off I had to fax them. In the end I got them to fax themselves my details. I'm not sure whether Bankwest is just incompetent, or if they d…

Weird. My experience with Australian banks has been the opposite. Sign up and ID verification online/in-app, and within a few minutes I have a new bank account I can transfer money in and out of.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#86

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:32 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #50

toast0 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law is not based on reality. If I sent you a fax, and your fax machine (of whatever type) printed it out, that copy is legally as good as the original. If I scan, then email, and you print it out, it is not legally as good as the original. It doesn't matter if it makes sense, it is what it is.

I wouldn’t be quite so hard on the law here. The law is based on precedent. Fax was a new technology. For the first time a signed document could be sent over the wire in minutes, instead of having a courier go via train and take days. This is 100 years before computers were common. When computers became common fax was already well established so there was no good reason to add a second exception.

I realize the fax predates POTS. But to say "When computers became common fax was already well established" is not really accurate. If you mean the 1970s (personal/home computer revolution), then no one had a fax machine at home back then. They just were not around.

Few offices had them, too -- teletypes were more common than fax machines, even though teletypes didnt do graphics like fax. I've read that police departments had fax machines for mug shots or maybe fingerprints, but i have no first-hand knowledge.

Anyway, I'm just trying to relate history to you from someone who was there. Wikipedia articles or retrospectives don't always get the nature of things right, even if they do get the hard facts like dates right.

Another example: you could say television was invented in the first decade of the 1900s. But they weren't household items until the 1950s, maybe late 1940s if you want to count NYC specifically.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#87

Post by tikwidd » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:38 AM UTC

talles wrote: post #19

Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax?

A lot of deaf people still use fax machines to do things like place orders (often older deaf folks that can't or won't use email... or when trying to deal with orgs that don't check their email). It's a very accessible technology (except for the blind I suppose). This was the case when I was working with some deaf people around 8 years ago, maybe things have changed since then as fax machines have become less common. But fax is still very popular in Japan IIRC.

For a while, it was handy to be able to fax forms to Studylink and WINZ (New Zealand social security/student loans orgs), but they have recently set up a website where you just scan or photograph documents and upload them.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#88

Post by TylerE » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:45 AM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #86

TylerE wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be quite so hard on the law here. The law is based on precedent. Fax was a new technology. For the first time a signed document could be sent over the wire in minutes, instead of having a courier go via train and take days. This is 100 years before computers were common. When computers became common fax was already well established so there was no good reason to add a second exception.

I realize the fax predates POTS. But to say "When computers became common fax was already well established" is not really accurate. If you mean the 1970s (personal/home computer revolution), then no one had a fax machine at home back then. They just were not around. Few offices had them, too -- teletypes were more common than fax machines, even though teletypes didnt do graphics like fax. I've read that police depart…

Faxes date from just after the civil war area. They were in common usage for transmitting contracts by the 1880s. Photographic material by the 1920s

This equipment would have typically been installed at a telegraph office, not at the end user site, but the basic technology is far older than most people assume.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#89

Post by GlennS » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:47 AM UTC

discordance wrote: post #85

GlennS wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this may be something that varies to region. I lived in the UK for 32 years and never sent a fax or even saw a fax machine outside of a museum. Couple of years ago I moved to Australia. Got a credit card for travel with Bankwest. In order to set up a direct debit to pay it off I had to fax them. In the end I got them to fax themselves my details. I'm not sure whether Bankwest is just incompetent, or if they d…

Weird. My experience with Australian banks has been the opposite. Sign up and ID verification online/in-app, and within a few minutes I have a new bank account I can transfer money in and out of.

Guess it varies per bank. My main accounts are with NAB, and they seem pretty up to date.

Maybe Bankwest in particular are stuck in the past.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#90

Post by cosmotic » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:48 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #40

cosmotic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering a fax is a print, I'm not sure what the printout comment is regarding. The presence and non-exclusion of email/IP gateways show how backwards the law surrounding this is.

The law is not based on reality. If I sent you a fax, and your fax machine (of whatever type) printed it out, that copy is legally as good as the original. If I scan, then email, and you print it out, it is not legally as good as the original. It doesn't matter if it makes sense, it is what it is.

The point I was trying to make is that you sending the fax could be pdf > email > fax service > pots > fax service > email > pdf. The end result is a lower quality replication compared to email > email. There's no way the law says either the fact that it looks worse than the email or that someone can point to a contract that says it took place over pots makes the transmission more valuable.