For small businesses that rely on faxes, one of my favorite features has always been Fax Never Busy. Unfortunately, as with many legacy features these days, Fax Never Busy is going away.

Business phone and Internet provider, Integra Telecom was one of the last carriers to offer this feature. It just notified me today that Fax Never Busy is no longer available. Part of its move to modernize its platforms.

Fax Never Busy was a function of the old Octel Voicemail platform. A few years ago, Intregra moved from a traditional voicemail platform to a new soft switch voicemail platform. Still, it kept the old platform up and working. Until now.

Here are two alternatives:

We can place a Call Forward Busy feature on your POTS line. This will make is so that when the line is busy/being used additional in-bound calls will be forwarded to a virtual fax number that will receive and store the fax as a PDF in the cloud. Email notification is an option on this, so customers can receive faxes as PDFs attached to emails right away. You can receive and print the PDFs you are sent.

The inconvenience of this is that there's a storage capacity limit, so you'll have to go in and clear out old PDFs every so often.

Alternatively, you can get a secondary fax line (and machine).

As with all telecom, these alternatives are customizable. Which of these you go with, if either, depends on your unique business needs.

For example, I am working with a customer right now who does not want his faxes to go to email. He wants them to come off a fax machine. So we are working to determine how many lines (and machines) he needs.

Let me know if you have any questions about what's right for your business. I can give you pricing on a variety of configurations. My direct line is (206) 420-0140.