Japan still in love with the fax

Despite being hailed for its techno-innovation, Japan is a little more traditional than many people think – over half of homes apparently still contain fax machines. 

The country’s businesses and government organisations continue to rely on the legacy technology to transmit important documents, while 59 per cent of households feature a clunky paper-muncher, according to a Washington Post article which cited Cabinet Office stats.

In Britain, some 40 per cent of workers in small and medium enterprises also still use faxes, according to an Intel report from last year, but the level of usage is more surprising given that by the end of 2011, the land of the rising sun had the second fastest average broadband speed of any country in the world, according to Akamai’s State of the Internet report.