This can make predictions about buying bandwidth capacity very difficult. On one hand you could underestimate, meaning that at peak times you are turning away thousands of potential customers. On the other, until bandwidth becomes a commodity, you risk paying for a resource you will not utilise for 99 percent of the time. Using analysis tools PSInet is able to identify peaks and troughs of network usage of different electronic retailers and attempts to match them to customers whose use of those services is complementary. The aim, says Valeria Holt, vice president of PSInet, is to produce mainframe-like processing efficiency through scheduling of processes and sharing of resources.
Web TV is just one way in which access to the Internet shopping centre is changing.
And on the other, there is an increasingly rich tapestry of Internet applications being developed, few of which recognise that handheld PCs and smartphones are the biggest growth area in computing. The new portals that recognise this pattern are rolling out applications that do electronic business by sending information to these devices from Web sites, while the traditional portals are still pondering traffic going the other way. Again, the constant state of flux that is the IT industry makes it difficult for strategists to judge with any certainty whether the current majority of retail sites should modify their applications to suit the new access devices, or whether they will evolve to cope. Or indeed if the whole market will fragment into niche services running on different platforms. The bandwidth for handheld devices is unlikely to be a constraint in the future, says Andy Bush, new technologies manager for Sun Microsystems.