The End of Copper Outside France: Your Faxes Country by Country

Short answer: the copper network isn't being switched off in France alone, and in several countries served by MondialFax it went dark earlier and more abruptly. Germany moved the bulk of its lines to IP back in the late 2010s; Belgium, Spain and Portugal have well-advanced copper withdrawal programmes driven by fibre rollout; Italy is progressing area by area, with copper still present in smaller municipalities; Canada, for its part, follows no national timetable at all, but a commercial withdrawal carrier by carrier, province by province. The very practical consequence for you: when a cross-border fax fails, the fault is often at the recipient's end, on a fax machine plugged in behind an IP router that no longer handles the protocol properly. Before blaming your transmission, check that the number still exists, that it really is a fax number and not a recycled voice line, and plan a digital fallback channel (beA, eBox, PEC, registro electrónico, Canadian online services) for the day the line goes down for good.

About MondialFax. This article is a technical information overview, unaffiliated with any carrier. MondialFax sends faxes free of charge and without registration to seven destinations (France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Canada) straight from a browser, with a daily sending limit. It does not assign a number and does not handle incoming faxes. See the supported countries and the end of the PSTN page.

Why a foreign timetable concerns you

A cross-border fax is a negotiation between two machines: yours (or your provider's server) and the one at the other end. The T.30 protocol assumes a stable analogue channel, with no voice compression, no packet loss and no "comfort noise". As soon as one link in the chain switches to voice over IP without clean transcoding, the negotiation degrades: speed drops, pages stop halfway, failure after thirty seconds of tones.

As long as the recipient was on copper, the problem stayed on your side. Now that both ends are on IP in most of the countries served, the causes of failure have shifted:

• the fax number was cancelled without notice, and now returns a voice dial tone;
• the fax machine was plugged back into the analogue port of a fibre router, without T.38 enabled;
• the organisation has switched to an official digital channel and lets the line ring into the void;
• the number was ported to a new carrier, with a few days of limbo in between.

That's why a country-by-country overview is more useful than yet another French timetable: the site's /envoyer-un-fax-a/ pages cover France, and what you're missing is the state of the network at the other end.

Germany: the country that finished ahead of the rest

Germany is the textbook case. Deutsche Telekom ran its "All-IP" migration from the mid-2010s, aiming to have moved the vast majority of ISDN and analogue lines onto IP by the end of the decade. The result: the German keyword fax abschaltung ("fax switch-off") became a mainstream question well before its French equivalent, and fax geht nicht ("the fax won't go through") is a high-volume search query.

What this means for your faxes to Germany:

• Surviving German fax machines are almost all behind a Fritz!Box-type router, on an analogue FON port. Quality then depends entirely on configuration: speed forced down to 9,600 baud, error correction (ECM) disabled, G.711 codec enforced. A fax that fails at a German medical practice is often a badly configured fax at the other end.
• On the administrative side, the shift is deliberate: beA (the special electronic mailbox for lawyers) is mandatory for exchanges with the courts, and the KIM network structures communications in the healthcare sector. Many court registries and insurance funds no longer accept fax as a primary inbound channel.
• Federal authorities and Bürgerämter increasingly communicate through online forms. A fax number still displayed on a municipal website is no guarantee that there's a machine plugged in behind it.

Before an important transmission to Germany, a voice call to the fax number remains the fastest test: if you hear a voice or a carrier message, there's no point sending.

Belgium: eBox and a gradual copper withdrawal

Belgium combines two trends. On one hand, Proximus is rolling out fibre on a massive scale and has announced a zone-by-zone copper withdrawal as fibre becomes available; on the other, the federal government is pushing its digital channels. The eBox (eBox Citizen and eBox Enterprise) centralises official correspondence from federal administrations, and MyMinfin absorbs most tax-related exchanges. In that context, a fax to a Belgian administration is often acceptable but rarely optimal: it lands in a scanned paper workflow, whereas the electronic channel is time-stamped and traceable.

The sectors where Belgian fax numbers are still alive: medical practices and laboratories, notaries, certain health insurance funds, hospital emergency departments, garages and insurers handling accident reports. For these recipients, the switch to fibre means a fax machine plugged into an ATA adapter — cheap hardware whose quality varies enormously. If you receive Belgian faxes and they arrive truncated, the adapter at the other end is the first suspect; on the receiving side, a properly configured T.38-compatible ATA adapter makes all the difference.

Spain: copper already largely behind us

Spain is, alongside Portugal, one of the most advanced countries in Europe for fibre optics. Telefónica has run a programme to close its copper exchanges spread over several years, with a complete withdrawal target announced for the middle of the decade. Many Spanish geographic numbers have therefore been natively VoIP for a long time.

On the administrative side, fax has all but disappeared from official dealings: the registro electrónico (the common electronic register, used with Cl@ve and electronic certificates) is the standard inbound channel for procedures, and the sedes electrónicas of ministries and autonomous communities rarely publish a fax number. The Spanish faxes still worth anything mainly concern hospitality, port logistics, some private clinics and provincial law firms.

Italy: PEC has won, copper holds on in places

Italy has the most structured alternative in Europe. PEC (Posta Elettronica Certificata) is legally valid email, mandatory for companies and professionals registered with their professional bodies, and searchable in INI-PEC, the national index of certified addresses. A PEC transmission produces proof of submission and delivery that a fax cannot provide. Since the rollout of the domicilio digitale and the INAD index for private individuals, the Italian administration has had a default channel that is no longer paper.

On the network side, TIM is pursuing its all-IP migration, but copper remains present in sparsely populated areas where fibre arrives later. The practical upshot: the Italian faxes that still work best are sometimes those of small municipalities and provincial studi, while large organisations have moved to PEC. When an Italian recipient gives you a PEC address, take it: it's legally more robust than a fax. Our article on the evidential value of fax sets out the reasoning.

Portugal: massive fibre, residual fax

Portugal boasts one of the highest fibre coverage rates in Europe, and copper lost its central role there very quickly. Portuguese administrations have moved to the Portal das Finanças, ePortugal and the services of the Autoridade Tributária; the Chave Móvel Digital serves as digital identity for most procedures. A Portuguese fax number that is still active most often belongs to the private sector: clinics, law firms, estate agencies in the Algarve, export services.

For French-speaking expatriates in Portugal, the useful instinct is reversed: before looking for a fax, check whether the procedure isn't already available online with authentication. When a fax is still required — often by a private organisation or a bank — sending from the browser is enough, with no line and no device.

Canada: no national timetable, a commercial withdrawal

Canada resembles no European country on this front. There is no national copper switch-off date: the CRTC sets out service obligations, and the incumbent carriers (Bell, Telus, Vidéotron, SaskTel, etc.) withdraw their traditional wireline services area by area, as fibre or fixed wireless replaces them. In remote parts of Quebec, Northern Ontario or the Prairies, an analogue line may well live on for years.

And yet Canada is the served country where fax remains most alive, especially in healthcare. In Quebec, the local vocabulary says it all: people talk about a télécopieur and courriel, and the fax machine is still basic equipment in many clinics, pharmacies and practices. We covered the organisations concerned in Fax machines in Quebec in 2026, and the Canada page summarises the useful area codes.

Official alternatives exist but are fragmented: Revenu Québec online services, clicSÉQUR for authentication, My Service Canada Account, the IRCC secure portal for immigration. Each covers its own remit; none replaces fax across the board in exchanges between healthcare professionals, which explains its longevity.

Summary table

The habits that save a cross-border transmission

1. Check the number before sending

Call the number by voice. Fax tone (a whistle): the machine is there. A human voice, voicemail, a carrier message or silence: don't send — ask for confirmation by phone or email. This ten-second check avoids the majority of failures wrongly blamed on the sending service.

2. Read the dialling code correctly

A number written in local format (0, 06, +34…) cannot be dialled from abroad without conversion. The dialling code guide lists the prefixes of the countries served, and our article Sending a fax abroad details the dialling pitfalls country by country.

3. Slim down the document

On a degraded connection, every page is a risk. A clean three-page document goes through better than a fifteen-page file scanned in colour and then converted. If you scan often, a document scanner with an automatic feeder produces far cleaner black-and-white images than a phone photo, and markedly reduces transmission failures.

4. Keep a record

Keep the transmission report, the time, the number of pages and a copy of the document you sent. For sensitive matters, an A4 expanding file folder remains the simplest way to keep the original, the confirmation and the correspondence together. Our detailed recommendations are in Fax delivery confirmation.

5. Plan around time zones

Between France and Quebec, six hours separate the working day; between France and Portugal, one hour. A fax sent at 9 a.m. from Paris arrives at 3 a.m. in Montreal: if there's paper, it will wait, but if the tray is empty or the machine is asleep, reception can fail without anyone noticing until midday.

If you receive faxes from abroad

Reception is the real breaking point. A machine connected to a line that is going to disappear will eventually stop receiving anything, silently. Three strategies, in order of robustness:

1. Fax-to-email with an IP provider: the number lives in the cloud, and the end of copper no longer concerns it. This is the default choice for anyone who has to keep a number that's been published for years.
2. Keeping the fax machine behind a well-configured ATA: viable if the machine is still useful internally. Enforce G.711, disable ECM, cap the speed. Keeping a compatible toner cartridge in reserve avoids the silly breakdown on a Friday evening.
3. Planned retirement: you publish a secure email address or an official channel for the country concerned, and leave the number redirecting for six months with an announcement message.

In every case, document the change with your overseas contacts: they are the ones who have your old number in an address book, sometimes on a spiral notepad that's been sitting next to the machine for ten years.

Frequently asked questions

My faxes to Germany always fail: where does that come from?

In the vast majority of cases, from the settings at the other end. German fax machines have been plugged into IP routers for a long time; if ECM is enabled or the speed is left at 33,600 baud, the negotiation breaks down. Ask your contact to force 9,600 baud and disable error correction, or get a secure email address instead.

Does fax still carry legal weight in Italy compared with PEC?

PEC is far more robust: it produces enforceable submission and delivery receipts, and professionals registered with their professional bodies have an address listed in INI-PEC. Fax remains an accepted means of communication in many private exchanges, but for anything with real stakes, PEC is the expected channel.

Is there an official copper switch-off date in Canada?

No. Unlike European programmes driven by an incumbent operator under regulatory supervision, Canada is seeing a gradual commercial withdrawal, area by area and carrier by carrier, under the CRTC's general framework. That is one of the reasons the fax machine survives there longer.

Can I send a fax to a country that isn't served, such as Switzerland or the United States?

No: the MondialFax form covers seven destinations (France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Canada) and rejects the rest. The up-to-date list is on the supported countries page.

Do I need software or a modem to send to these countries?

No, not if you use an online service: the document goes out from the browser. Software installed on a computer requires a modem and a phone line capable of carrying a fax call — precisely what the end of copper is making increasingly rare. The details are in Free fax software in 2026.

Key takeaways

• The end of copper is asynchronous: Germany has finished, Spain and Portugal are well advanced, Belgium is progressing zone by zone, Italy still has copper outside its cities, and Canada has no national date.
• Each country has its own official replacement channel: beA and KIM in Germany, eBox and MyMinfin in Belgium, registro electrónico in Spain, PEC, INI-PEC and INAD in Italy, ePortugal and Chave Móvel Digital in Portugal, and provincial and federal online services in Canada.
• Canada, and Quebec in particular, remains the destination where the fax machine is most alive, especially in healthcare.
• When a transmission fails, suspect the number and the recipient's configuration first, not your sending service.
• For receiving, an IP-hosted number is the only option that no longer depends on a shutdown timetable.
• Before any cross-border transmission: check the number by voice, convert the dialling code, slim down the document, keep the report, and factor in the time difference.