I discovered an easy fix to an annoying facsimile machine problem this week that I thought was worth sharing, because it seems to affect a lot of small businesses.

Occasionally I would get a call from a customer saying we did not get your fax. Also saying that they don’t seem to have a problem with other fax machines “maybe yours has a fault”. Since mine is new and a larger and dedicated fax machine, and since I have seen some of my customers old style phone/faxes and some that need to be switched on each time etc., (Some businesses even switch their fax machines off overnight? Why? A fax machine is your unpaid all-hours employee). Also since our business receives and sends faxes regularly throughout the day, on most days, I just figured well, mine seems to be working correctly, so if one of our machines has a bug in it, then its probably not mine. This turned out to be a bad assumption.

Several customers had said that their fax seems to have problems with just some fax machines and not others.

Last week a customer insisted that his fax works well with other faxes and that he had also experienced problems with mine before. So I decided I might have an intermittent fault or a problem with certain categories of other fax machines and needed to investigate the matter.

I phoned the manufacturer (Brother) for tech support and was surprised to discover the way they handled this intermittent fault was quite simple. He gave me a number for a Telstra FaxStream TestFax Plus fax 1300 368 999. He advised that Telstra’s test machine would fax a report back automatically with details of the performance of our fax transmission.

That report came back promptly and showed that our fax’s transmission level settings were way too low. I phoned back the tech support guy. He walked me through a few button pumps to change that setting on the machine and wallah! 5 minutes later a second test fax to Telstra’s above number says our transmission level is now excellent.

Obviously our machine came new with the wrong transmission settings. Maybe they expect it to be set on site? In any case, if you have any doubts about your fax transmission performance or you have a customer or acquaintance that seems to have a fax problem, then the above Telstra Faxstream TestFax Plus number might be the answer.

Telstra’s feedback also notes that you should test the transmission level of your machine if you move it to a new phone line and further that 85% of all fax transmission problems are caused by wrong transmission level settings.