Computer users insist on warp speed
NETWORK delays eat up three working days a year for the average computer user — and the problem is that the speed of light is just too slow.
A worldwide survey commissioned by IT company Dimension Data found that users lost an average of 35 minutes a month because of network log-in delays, 25 minutes a month because of slow e-mail and 23 minutes a month on file transfers.
Gary Middleton, a business development manager at the company, said the laws of physics were at least partly to blame: “The big problem we have here, and it sounds stupid, but it’s the speed of light.
“There are electrical characteristics of a network, or a fibre-optic cable, that mean it takes a certain amount of time for a piece of information to travel along it. And it doesn’t matter what you do, you can’t speed that up because it’s going at the speed of light.”
He said there were technologies that helped overcome the limitations of light speed by compressing or prioritising network traffic.
“Users today are becoming less tolerant of poor performance. The younger generation wants much quicker access to everything.”
But network capacity at many companies was being overloaded by staff doing Google searches and accessing sites such as Facebook, to chat with friends, or Expedia. com to plan holidays.
“Users want things like e-commerce, social networking, podcasts, video, all of these new Web 2.0- type applications. They want to use much more in the work space,” said Middleton.
“[They] use these technologies at home. They get familiar with them, they like what they see, they like the ease of use … and how they connect to other people, and they feel their jobs would improve if they could use these technologies at work .”
IT expert James Blake predicted that e-mail use was about to increase significantly in Africa.
“There’s a lot of dial-up usage still within Africa, which means that e-mail is absolutely the killer application. The other person doesn’t need to be online for you to communicate.
“It’s an incredibly democratising technology for communications,” he said.
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