Flakiness of USPTO’s central fax number

USPTO’s central fax number is flaky and the subsequent USPTO workflow is unacceptably sluggish. 

What we are accustomed to, for the past twenty or so years, is that we can send a fax to the USPTO Central Fax Number (571-273-8300) and in response we will receive a fax from the USPTO.  A first fax goes in one direction and a second fax goes in the other direction.  The second fax is entitled Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission and it quotes page 1 of the first fax.  The second fax also states the page count from the first fax.  This second fax is important because we can stick it into our file.  If later the USPTO were to play dumb and pretend it never received the fax, then we could use the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission to try to shame the USPTO into admitting that yes, it did receive the fax.

Years ago in our firm’s experience, the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission always arrived.

But in recent months we find that quite often the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission fails to arrive.

As a first example, on September 29, 2024, we sent ten faxes to the Central Fax Number.  But in only three cases did we receive the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission in response.  This is a success rate of only 30% at receiving the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission faxes.

As a second example, on October 7, 2024, we sent ten more faxes to the Central Fax Number.  But in only two cases did we receive the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission in response.  This is a success rate of only 20% at receiving the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission faxes.

If you start making a list of all of the things that might explain a failure of the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission to arrive, I suppose you could wonder “what if the USPTO tried to send all ten of the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission faxes almost simultaneously?” and what if our inbound fax machine had been “busy” receiving one of the faxes and so our fax machine might have been “busy” for the other nine inbound faxes?

Or what if our fax machine had been “busy” sending faxes 7 through 10 to the USPTO at the same time that the USPTO’s system was trying to send us the Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission for faxes 1 through 4?

But that dog won’t hunt.  Our inbound fax is a fax-to-email service.   It is not reliant on a physical fax machine to receive physical telephone calls on a physical telephone line.  The service provider has bandwidth to receive hundreds of simultaneous faxes at that single fax number.  Another way to describe this is that our inbound fax number is never busy no matter how many people are trying to send a fax to us at any particular time.

So no, that is not the reason for a mere five out of twenty of the expected Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission faxes to arrive.

Anyway, in the old days, absolutely every expected Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission fax really did arrive as expected.  And on a recent day, only 20% of the expected Auto-Reply Facsimile Transmission faxes did arrive.