PC Users Should Be Able to Fax With On-Line Services

Your July 30 article, “The Evolution of PC Fax,” pointed out the barely touched potential of the personal computer market. But it seems to me there ought to be a better solution than purchasing $500 to $1,000 worth of add-on boards and software.

Like many personal computer owners, I already own a computer, printer and modem. Fax is clearly the coming thing, and I do find occasions when I’d like to receive or transmit a fax from my computer. But those occasions are still far too infrequent to justify that kind of capital outlay.

What I’d really like to do is to rent fax services using my existing modem, with no additional hardware or software. A few of the on-line services, such as Compuserve and MCI Mail, offer limited send-text-only transmissions to fax machines at fairly steep prices. But to my knowledge nobody offers complete, low-cost, full graphics, with send and receive fax capabilities.

It should be possible to send a fax document with routing information to an on-line service by uploading a file in a standard graphics format. The on-line service would then covert your file to facsimile format and forward it from its own fax equipment. Similarly, it could receive faxes and store them in an electronic mailbox for your later retrieval and download.

Such a service would attract new subscribers and could be extremely profitable. It might even pay an on-line service to forgo charging extra for fax usage, and instead make its money on the extra connect time needed by its customers.

This would provide a PC user with all the elements of fax except for document scanning. You would pay only for the faxes you actually sent or received. It could be demonstrably more cost effective than purchasing your own fax equipment.

The best analogy can be found in videotapes. Most of us only want to see a movie once or a handful of times, so we rent tapes rather that buy them. Recognition of this fact has dotted our cities with video stores and created a multibillion-dollar rental industry.

A similar potential exists to make fax cheap and easily accessible to every personal computer owner. Millions of them are out there, myself included, just waiting.

DANIEL WIENER

Simi Valley