SKY FAX (スカイファックス)

» see softbank.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

SKY FAX did one thing. You composed a message on a mobile phone, either through the carrier's web menu or by sending an email to the right address, and the service printed it on somebody's fax machine. There was no software to install and no account to open. SoftBank's own closing notice describes it as the first service in Japan to do this, and it started in August 2001 in the Tokai region before going nationwide.

The billing was per sheet. Thirty yen for an A4 page, with no monthly fee and no application form to fill in, which made it a relative of every other Sky-branded service on that network: you paid for each thing you asked for and nothing at all when you were idle. It rode the second-generation PDC network, so the message itself was going out over the same circuit-switched plumbing that carried Sky Mail, with a gateway at the far end converting text into something a fax machine would accept.

SoftBank announced the end on 6 April 2007, and the release is still on softbank.jp today. SKY FAX would stop on Saturday 30 June 2007. The company said it had considered demand for the service and, rather than offering a replacement of its own, named one belonging to somebody else: FAXCAST, from J-Link of Mihama-ku in Chiba, which could send a fax from a mobile email address. The notice prints J-Link's president and head office address, the way you would introduce a supplier rather than a rival, and promises to pass the details along from late May.

~ the dossier ~

~ the letter they sent to the people who used it ~

The notice contains one line that says more about the size of this product than any subscriber figure would. SoftBank promised to send direct mail to customers who had used SKY FAX at least once between 1 January and 30 April 2007, and to put a note on the company website for everybody else.

That is a four-month window standing in for the definition of an active user. Everyone who had sent a single fax since New Year got a letter addressed to them; everyone else got a line on a web page. The operator was able to work out who would miss it by running one query.

~ it died before the network did ~

SKY FAX was a 2G product and it stopped on 30 June 2007. SoftBank's second-generation network kept running until two in the morning on 31 March 2010, which means the service was switched off almost three years before the technology underneath it was. Sky Mail, its sibling on the same network, went the distance and died with the radio.

The gateway was closed on its own merits, while the phones that could reach it were still in daily use. SoftBank's 2G network still held more than five hundred thousand contracts at the end of February 2010, nearly three years after the fax service had gone. What ran out first was the reason to send a fax from a phone, and that was running out on every network at once. Fax machines are still answering in Japanese offices in 2026, nineteen years after the service that fed them from a phone was switched off. The sending end died first and the receiving end is still waiting.

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