Infographic: The Compelling Argument for Using Internet Fax
Believe it or not, the fax machine is still being used across the world – despite the distribution of internet-based fax services such as RingCentral. Whilst most connection in the business world revolves near smartphones, email, internet messaging and other web-based app, there are still millions using paper-based fax machines on a daily basis. This has a wide range of inferences from both a cost and environmental perspective.

Infographic on Fax Machine Usage Around the World
The following infographic below gives you an overview on facts about global faxing including:

1. How many fax machines there are in the world.
2. How many faxes get sent each year globally.
3. How much paper is used to send faxes every year.
4. How many trees get cut down to serve this outdated mode of communication.
5. How this could have a financial implication for your business or company.

How Many Fax Machines Are in the World?
For the sake of simplicity, the above infographic only shows the top five countries in terms of fax ownership, which are the United States (17.3 million), Japan (11.9 million), Germany (3.7 million), France (2.1 million) and the United Kingdom (1.6 million). Globally, there are more than 46 million fax machines in operation. These are truly staggering numbers.

How Many Faxes Are Sent Each Year
In order to understand how many sending a fax from iphone were sent each year, an assumption had to be made that each fax machine in existence would send one a day. It’s difficult to say whether this is optimistic or pessimistic, but for me it’s the best metric to apply based on my experiences of working in a business environment.

By using the global statistics on fax machines, I calculated how many faxes were being sent each year, and I think the number will surprise you – it’s a huge 16,921,193,736!

To put that into some kind of perspective, if the paper used was stacked into one single pile, it would reach 853 miles (or 1,373 kilometers) high. To make that a bit more visual, try to imagine the Empire State Building being multiplied by a factor of three thousand. Or how about that Austrian guy who did the Red Bull space jump recently? He would have had to go 35 times higher just to reach the peak of this crazy paper pile! Now… can you imagine how much paper that is? I can tell you…

How Much Paper is Used to Send Faxes?
With the amount of paper being used every year via traditional fax machines, we’re talking around 2 million trees getting cut down annually. That’s over 10 square miles of forest, or the equivalent to 4,840 football pitches side by side. As you can imagine, the environmental impact of this kind of paper usage is huge – but it doesn’t need to be that way.

RingCentral offers digital faxing capability with the RingCentral internet fax service. By switching to RingCentral Fax, it’s possible for companies to do their bit for the environment and also reduce their carbon footprint and impact on the planet’s resources.

Get more:
Make Free Faxs with Google Voice
Top 3 Android Apps for Free Faxs