Internet traffic to increase by 700%
Internet traffic to increase by 700%
THE amount of data, such as internet traffic, transferred over telephone lines will increase by 700% over the next five years, predicts British Telecoms head of data business development Martin England.
Speaking at a Farm IT seminar, he also forecast that the unit price of transferring data will fall by 75-80%.
He said a new internet address was created every four seconds and the equivalent of over 3m sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were accessed through the internet every month.
"Technology can be seen as a threat because it breaks business traditions, but it offers more freedom."
Products such as ISDN lines could improve efficiency of data transfer. However, he believed that future changes in mobile phone technology would also help.
"The current GSM digital system can transfer data at 9.6kbit/second, but GPRS, which will replace GSM within the next 12 months, is much faster, at up to 54kbits/second.
"Moving to GPRS also offers advantages in that if a call is broken – for instance, when going through a tunnel – it will immediately pick it up when the signal returns, rather than you having to redial."