The lifecycle of fax machines has come to an end, or so Ofcom seems to believe.
The UK regulator has proposed updating the USO – a set of rules that ensures everyone in the UK has access to telecommunication services – to remove the requirement for telecommunications companies to provide facsimile machine connections.
At the moment, BT and KCOM are the two designated telecom providers responsible for universal service in the UK, meaning they are legally obliged to ensure the existence of an affordable national telephone and fax service across the UK.
The move comes amid the diminishing use of fax machines, which were first commercialised by Xerox in 1964 and reached a peak in popularity in the late 1980s. The technology works by processing the contents of a fixed graphic image and transmitting it through the telephone line using audio-frequency tones. These tones are then received by another fax machine and used to reconstruct a printed replica of the...
