Seven years after some of its competitors entered the broadcast facsimile market, Singapore Telecommunications Ltd associate Unifi Communications Inc, formerly Fax International Inc, has launched its worldwide broadcast fax service, Unifi Broadcast, to serve what it claims is a market growing rapidly in spite of electronic mail. Founded in 1990, the Lowell, Massachusetts company originally made its name offering guaranteed international fax delivery. It says 28% of international faxes still do not get through first time, and the user gets charged for each disconnection and retry. Unifi has its own international network of leased lines, with operations in 15 cities in 10 countries, and has grown to a $50m company on the strength of Unifi Direct, which routes faxes to the Unifi office nearest the fax destination, and then makes a local call from there to the recipient. Any failure or retry costs are borne by Unifi. Unifi Broadcast enables the user to send one single fax, to thousands of people. Unifi holds a list, or lists, compiled by the customer in its Oracle database, with contact details and fax numbers. The customer simply sends the single fax, with instructions as to which list to send the message to. Once the single fax has gone through the sender’s machine, the machine is free to send and receive as usual. Unifi then routes groups of faxes to its nearest office, and sends them on from there. The company’s UK operation says it can cope with 16,000 faxes an hour from its offices alone. Faxes can be hard copy, or a TIF file directly from the PC. The system also monitors delivery, and reports on failures. Unifi estimates the broadcast fax service is 60% less expensive than traditional methods. It also believes the market has been growing 50% a year over the past two and a half years, and says this will be a continuing trend, in spite of electronic mail, which still has not really reached many parts of the world, and where there are still many legacy systems which cannot talk to the rest of the world.
