Just The Fax

I recently had to review the operation of a fax-based system I created to deliver clinical reports to doctors. Someone claimed that a report had gone astray and in response, I had to dig through the logs and the database rows to confirm that the report had been delivered.

This left us at a very faxly impasse: I say the report arrived and they say that it did not.

This somewhat tiresome trip down memory lane made me reconsider the place of fax technology in the current environment.

Once upon a time I liked facsimile technology. It was the best way to deliver nicely and reliably formatted reports to a specific location with a low chance of eavesdropping.

(Once the paper report came out of the fax machine security was an open issue but it was also someone else's problem.)

I still like the maturity of the technology and the fact that I have lots of mature code that does cool fax-related things.

What I do not like is the usual list of issues with a waning technology as well as some fax-specific issues.

The usual waning technology issue are these:

- The infrastructure (POTS) is shrinking; in fact, since our office went VOIP I cannot debug faxing in our office.

- The hardware is harder to come by; I am having to hoard fax modems to ensure that I have spares.

- The system software is no longer common; it is not installed on servers by default and it is not easy to integrate serial lines into the clustering environment.

The specifically fax issues fall into one of two categories: inherent and acquired. By "inherent" I mean that these issues are a part of the faxing technology itself. By "acquired" I mean that these issues have arisen because our environments and expectations have changed, making faxes seem degraded by comparison with prevailing norms.

The inherent issues are the unreliable delivery and the degradation of retransmission; a fax of a fax is often pretty hard to read. The unreliable delivery is more of a problem: paper jams, ink runs out, fax machines get turned off and phone lines are sometimes busy. I refer to the protocol jargon meaning of unreliable: it may wok most of the time, but I cannot really tell if it worked, at least without calling and asking.

The ways in which our expectations have left faxes behind are these:

- The transfer speed is now rather low.

- The data is not integrated into anything else: the report lands on paper and stays there.

- The report arrives at a fixed physical location but more and more we move around when we work.

- The security is now rather lacking; back in the day, the point-to-point nature of POTS was pretty secure. Now, the lack of passwords and access logging is pretty lame.

My investigation ended with my system claiming to have delivered the report and the user claiming that the fax never arrived. Finally someone in the target office found the paper and all was once again right with the world.

All's well that ends well, but I must confess that I am looking forward to the day that doctors find something to replace faxing. Soon I hope.