Editor’s Corner:
INTERNET FAX: What the Future Holds
I went to FaxWorld held by Giga Information in San Francisco earlier this month and by
the end of the conference heard a forecast report that would call for strategy
re-evaluation by many vendors. The future may not hold a bright picture for those who only
look to rake in profits by saving money for companies using the Internet for faxing.
Eric Arnum, editor of EMMS newsletter, explained this in his very convincing
presentation. The cost of a phone call, he said, is not based the length of the call but
rather on the connection that is made. It’s those first few seconds of setting up the
call that costs the carriers money. As carriers build up their fiber networks, they will
have so much capacity they will seek to get people to make many more calls and so up their
revenues. Arnum sees the price of a phone call going down to as low as 5 cents to anywhere
in the world. You’ll be paying for connectivity not for time. There will be virtually
no difference between local, domestic long distance and international calls.
As that price revolution goes on, the major carriers are busy buying up the major ISP
companies. WorldCom’s acquisition of Compuserve and AOL is as a recent example. As
the carriers gain control over the Internet, pricing there will shift from the flat rates
we all enjoy today to per-minute pricing. It could cost more, in the future, to use the
Internet than traditional phone lines.
These pricing shifts will change the playing field. Right now consumers have gotten
used to flat rates. After being spoiled like that, the price-per-minute could seem
horrendous. Instead of seeing usage rise, this could decline because of this. And if
people pay by the minute they could find advertising and lots of gorgeous graphics a drain
on their pocketbooks. Imagine if you paid by the minute for your cable connection! It
might put a damper on watching long shows or movies. It might also, I would think,
increase the use of push technology.
The key to marketing Internet fax, in the long run, is not emphasizing cost-savings but
the value-added features it brings to networks.
