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. Change in the number of users
2. New technology that allows higher transfer of data
Inhibitors:
1. Change in the number of users
2. 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.
3. Virtual workers. The number of virtual workers is constantly increasing as companies nowadays put more and more accent on creating multi-cultural teams. Multi-cultural teams, most of the times, involve people that work online, from all over the world. The popularity of virtual workers is increasing because it has advantages to work from home instead of the office, one doesn’t have to move for a new job etc. With the number of virtual workers, the expectations of quality and reliability are increasing too.
4. High-bandwidth applications. These applications, such as high definition videos, require a significant amount of bandwidth.