A story today about faxing in 2019:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-28/history-of-the-fax-machine-why-it-is-still-alive/10930232

Yes I have 2 specialist doctors and they have fax machines still!
Both are high level surgeons at professor level.
I was amazed.
One of them wanted a document faxed to him only after a phone contact..
I copied it and got in my car drove to the hospital (10 minutes away) and walked into his office and handed the "fax" over the counter!
His secretary was amazed. I told her I had no idea how to send a fax now.
Then I found out it was still in common use between medics as they regarded it as security proof.
I just smiled and left.
With other medics I have just scanned and emailed like I thought every body did now.
Fred.

One problem I used to face with faxes in the office, where the fax was on a PABX extension, was someone would enter our fax number incorrectly into their fax machine and the call would go to a desk phone. Many of us were familiar with answering a call only to hear the familiar whistling tones of a fax modem. Simply hanging up didn't help because most fax machines were programmed to redial "unanswered" calls a number of times -- where unanswered meant not answered by another modem.

The trick was to forward such whistling calls to the PABX extension of the office fax, and then call the sender to ask them to correct the number. However, many such faxes would be from spammers flogging stuff, so the call was usually to ask them to remove your office fax number entirely.

On Friday a reptionist at my local medical centre faxed, via a fax/printer, a doctor's referral to a specialist at a private hospital. I was surprised because I would have expected the medical centre to have been cut over to NBN by now, given that it's been available in the area for nearly a year. And for that matter, I would have expected the hospital to have been cut over by now, too.

Brad: what are hospitals planning to do about the NBN's lack of fax capability?

Doctors are reluctantly moving over to encrypted e-mail though they should have done this 20 years ago instead of keeping their communications methods in the 18th century. Some are using fax-to-email services.

The hospital I work at still has a couple of dozen fax machines but we have a PABX so there's no issue with connectivity for us.

The hospital I work at still has a couple of dozen fax machines but we have a PABX so there's no issue with connectivity for us.

A while back I read that the NBN infrastructure does not support fax tones, however I now read that IP-enabled faxes will work over the NBN, so I guess the hospital uses IP-enabled machines or maybe the PABX has adapter ports for 'regular' faxes.

Our PABX has digital extensions for most of the phones and analogue extensions for fax machines, alarm panel monitoring and a handful of cordless phones. These analogue extensions are equal to what we used to have in our homes before some lunatic devised the NBN on a scrap of paper. The PABX is basically a small telephone exchange and acts as an interface between its extensions and the outside world.

Like Jamie Lees mate did when I worked for Telecom the works depot would fax out the work orders for the next day to all the exchanges so that when you arrived in the morning there was a heap of telephone work orders ready for the guys sitting on the fax machine.

Each exchange was sent the stuff at a set time each night and we frequently had problems with a Fax Spammer hitting our machine with all manner of crap at about the time we were due to receive our work for the next day. The send system was electronic and would make 4 attempts to get through and then bomb out so that a human was required to send the fax the following morning.

We got sick of this and one of our guys got one of the Spammers faxes and scrawled all over it that it was NOT wanted and IF he did NOT stop we would lock his fax machine up for days receiving his messages back CONSTANTLY.
Then they made up a loop of the fax and set it going so that when the clown got to his machine our sending had consumed all his paper with his doctored Spam message.

He was furious and sent us a rather nasty fax and we just repeated that fax in a loop form again that night so again his machine would have run out of paper and we never had another one from him.

We COULD have really screwed him up by using the remote test facility to hop onto his phone line and just sit there doing nothing so his end got no Dial Tone and anyone calling him got Busy.so his fax would have been well and truly out of action for as long as we left the robot tester camped on his number.
But never had to bother.

Lindsay

I used to be able to do that to people who used to flood this website years ago when I hosted the site myself. I'd use my name servers to redirect anything from the offending IP addresses back at the idiot causing the problem. It wouldn't stop me being flooded but because the sender was basically dealing with twice the data, they'd eventually get the message when their bandwidth was being consumed to the point where the flooding would slow to a crawl. End result is that they'd give in.

It's not easy to do on a server that is owned by someone else though.

Just noticed this on Telstra's website: "If you'd prefer to send us your complaint by fax, you can do so on 1800 753 949."