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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
He said there were technologies that helped overcome the limitations of light speed by compressing or prioritising network traffic.<\/p>\n
“Users today are becoming less tolerant of poor performance. The younger generation wants much quicker access to everything.” <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“[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 .”<\/p>\n
IT expert James Blake predicted that e-mail use was about to increase significantly in Africa. <\/p>\n
“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. <\/p>\n
“It’s an incredibly democratising technology for communications,” he said.<\/p>\n