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Product and Service Reviews |
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Call Wave and
Fax Wave One evening my son came to me with a Web address for a free "Internet Answering Machine" service (voice mail service) that he had seen advertised on the Web. The chief benefit of the service, as my teenage son saw it, was that he could tie up our home phone line all night surfing the World Wide Web or chatting with friends and would still be able to get calls from his other friends. What could be better than that! Even though I use the Internet almost daily I had not seen a service of this type before my son brought it to my attention, so, I took a look at it. The site has a nice easy to read layout with nice graphics so I spent some time looking at it. The advertisement on the Web site says "Hear who’s calling while you’re online! Avoid the cost of an extra phone line. It’s FREE! It downloads in less than a minute. It’s EASY! Tell your Friends" Right! I'll just tell all my friends and they will come gunning for me when they find that they had to turn over their first born in return for the "free" service. All of Callwaves promises sounded fine but there had to be a catch, right? Well, the only catch I could see was that call-forwarding-on-busy service was required to enable the free service to work. Call-forwarding-on-busy is a service that is available from most telephone companies and one which I was not willing to buy to be able to test Callwave. Being skeptical of anything that is advertised as being "free", I was convinced that there was more of an obligation required to be able to subscribe to this "free" service than I could see mentioned on the Web site. |
I told my son to forget about it.
(incidentally, I did not know it at the time but free Web based voice
mail is available from several vendors).
Faxwave makes this grand promise: "With FaxWave, you no longer need a dedicated fax line. We give you your very own, private fax number that you can publish on your business cards and stationery. Sending a fax to this number is no different than sending a fax to a standard fax machine. FaxWave automatically routes your faxes to your e-mail inbox as an e-mail attachment that you can view with standard viewing applications." The difference, as I saw it, between Faxwave and Callwave was that Faxwave does not require an additional service from the phone company. This was my chance to prove the TANSTAAFL! principle to my son. For those of you who are not familiar with the TANSTAAFL! principle; There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch! So, I signed up for the service. The software download and installation took only about five minutes. Once I had the service set up I sent a few faxes to myself to test it. Within minutes I heard the chime on my personal computer that indicates that I have just received new e-mail. |
There they were, the faxes I had sent to
myself. They came as attachments to the e-mail. Finally! The
catch! My faxes would be adulterated with all kinds of
advertising, right? Wrong! There was only a very small
advertisement in each e-mail. Each of the actual faxes was exactly
as I had sent them.
The faxes are in a graphic format that a standard Windows PC will recognize and open when you double click on the attachment's file name. From there you can save it or print it. After a trial period of several weeks we converted the Management Science Institute's main fax to Faxwave (775-719-6150). The three biggest benefits to us having Faxwave are that we save the expense of a telephone line, we can easily archive the faxes, and we do not pay for paper and toner to print junk faxes. Those are three very big advantages to using Faxwave rather than a conventional fax machine. MSI has been using Faxwave for a couple of months and the service has proven to be very reliable. It is so relaibe, in fact, that we are beginning to put the number on all our printed matter. The only disadvantage to Faxwave is that it requires a long distance phone call. The good news is that when I sent several test faxes the cost for each fax was only around 20 cents. So, while it may be true that "There Ain't No Such Thing As A
Free Lunch!", there is Faxwave! |
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