Executive Summary IMRA Fax Market OverviewCurrently, network service providers are seeing opportunities to move fax traffic from the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to data networks. IP based fax revenues are expected to grow from about $150 million in 1998 to as much as $4 billion in 2001 and as much as $250 billion by 2005. There are 100 million fax machines worldwide that account for about 80% of all faxes (20% via LANs a figure that is projected to grow to 500% in the next couple of years). And 1.55 billion people in the world have access to fax vs. 80 million email addresses today 50% in the USA. Industry analysts predict that companies can save 30 50 percent by faxing over Internet. Approximately 40% of all their traffic of the PSTN today is fax traffic. Other than VoIP, fax is probably the most lucrative and sought after telecommunications products available today. It is a service that can be offered in most countries due to less legal restrictions placed on data services (vs. VoIP). The technology is also more dependable than VoIP since the service issues of voice like latency, packet loss, echo, etc., do not affect or exist in this service; as such, it allows service providers to offer high quality of service using their public internet dialup connections. |
