The availability of Internet bandwidth

Back? The future of books

Descrition:

The internet, since its invention, has captured the attention of 25% of the global population. The internet bandwidth in the last few years has tripled, because every day more and more people become users. The supply has tried to keep up with the demand but in a world driven by technology, when everything is uploaded, people focus mainly on the online resources and aim for the highest quality of videos, online conferences and calls, can the internet keep up with the increasing expectations? The internet has always offered enough bandwidth to satisfy the demand and specialists say that this won’t stop, but all resources are limited.

The internet has created new opportunities and brought with it the new commerce. The e-book commerce is directly connected to the internet development, and if the internet would crash, the whole e-book industry will crash with it, as the only way of distributing e-books will disappear.

The implications of an internet bandwidth shortage are severe. Providers would increase their prices, people would have limited access to internet, and the e-book commerce would have a lot to suffer. The price of e-book would increase to cover the costs with the internet to such a level that they could cost more than a printed book. Add to that the decrease in customer numbers.

On the other hand, if providers anticipate the moment of shortage of the internet, they can make sure that the bandwidth available is enough to satisfy all requests. This forecast would bring a new wave of customers interested in buying or accessing online books.

Enablers:

1. Increase in the number of users. 25% of the global populations are users, which means that there are still 4 billion people that in the near future can become users of the internet. The number of users in the last couple of years has tripled; therefore, one should expect that this won’t stop as there are different projects of making computers available for a low price in under-developed countries. The competition in the internet providers industry has determined an accessible price for surfing online.

An explosion in the number of users could take the internet providers by surprise. As the demand would exceed the supply, the quality of service will go down, and a slow access to the internet will affect the sales of e-books. (Assume that some e-books are read on-line)

2. New technology that allows higher transfer of data

3. Demographics. The population growth rate is slowly decreasing which make the number of potential users increase (with a slower rate).

Inhibitors:

1. Decrease or constant number of users

2. Inaccessibility at internet by people in poor countries

3. Increase in internet cable snapping. An increase in internet cable that connects continents makes the risk of cable snapping higher. This can happen because of submarines,geological changes (the distance between some platforms increases), earthquakes.