It's 2022, who still uses faxes?
Today I went to a business where they wouldn't take my order over email -- fax only. The year is 2022 for Pete's sake!! HN: what's the craziest surviving fax-only situation that you've had to deal with?
In my scientific business in the 1990's I would select my fax machine according to the maximum length of paper it would send & receive. IIRC the best was about 8.5 x 39 inches or about a meter length of A4 width paper.
We still had research instruments using similar thermal paper rolls themselves which plotted real-time data and that could be a few feet of paper if you were printing for more than an hour or so.
Clients loved it when I could fax the whole thing, even if their poor fax machine broke it up into smaller pages.
Then about the time of W9x I would fax it from the fax machine to a PC's analog modem to get it into a single Windows file using the Windows faxing routine.
Interestingly, in the cargo business we had them much earlier when they were still called telecopiers. You would generally have a dedicated operator at each end (of the world, one of which was always likely to be called out after-hours for the "emergency" paperwork transmission) for the duration of the not-fully-reliable 300 baud session.
Once the technology became a bit more user-friendly then attorneys began to wish they could use it but since the legal paperwork itself physically was not actually issued by their office it was no go. Our clients pay well for expedited paperwork and agreed in advance to accept it. Once the attorneys got the name changed from telecopier to "facsimile" machine they were fine after that.
Most Hospitals
If you need records transferred from one institution to an out-of-network provider, they usually need the request by fax and the data is sent by fax.
Varies by institution of course
I actually think Fax is pretty damn good precisely because no one is using it. So all you get from Fax are signals. And mostly better signals because people make an effort to fax you.
I used to hate Fax, thinking it is some old technology that should die. Along with Pager. But I have now grown to appreciate these technologies.
Work in a doctor's office. We still use it daily to get documents from hospitals.
In BC government services that require confidentiality tend to use faxes: healthcare, child welfare, that sort of thing.
I work at a library. We rarely use our fax machine internally, but we send faxes for patrons at $1 per page. This may sound steep, but it's because we really don't like dealing with the fax machine either. If they have a lot of pages, we try to confirm with them, "are you sure you can't send an email? We can help you with that too!", but there are still some weird cases where people just need to send a fax, so it's still there.
Most doctor's offices.
Fax is considered to be HIPAA compliant if done properly, so it is still the defacto method of sending orders etc...
For a small non-technical health practice, in many cases it's the only option.
I went to an optician, and they had to call my insurance. The insurance sent them a fax as a form of 2FA to make sure they were talking to the right store.
Manufacturing, finance, health care, and government.
Older people are very familiar with fax machines and nowadays you can send digital fax via e-mail to fax machine.
Company IT is still often in relatively dysfunctional state and people lack skills. Multi-function printers are often worse quality and harder to use than fax machines.
Machine that does only one thing can be preferred for these reasons.
Fax machines also print confirmation receipts.
Wells Fargo brokerage. They rehire you to fax documents to them. Thank god they do t require me to burn a CD like the FDA!
Fax is faster than opening an email, downloading, finding correct file, try to print it, printer warms up and then prints.... Vs automatically prints without bothering anything.
Why would you want to do business with such a business? If they are that stuck in their ways, they probably don't care about customers anyway.
At the wife's office there is a fax machine which spews a daily sermon in curled paper onto the floor of their little kitchen.
I think I read that a great deal of regional health offices handling vaccination rates and infection rates during the Covid pandemic in Germany, sent their data back to higher (federal) offices with fax.