Text A. State of play

To celebrate our 10^th anniversary, we invited industry leaders to share their thoughts about the changing world of Telecoms and IT. To find out what they think, read on...

Peter Wilson

The world is now plugged in, and countries are connected up using a mixture of terrestrial networks, undersea cables, satellite and micro­wave communications, Wi-Max and Wi-Fi, GSM and 3G. The move from packet-based services to the internet protocol means everyone expects to communicate voice, data and video from anywhere to anywhere, globally. The availability of wide area data services such as MPLS and Ethernet have spread all over the world, allowing companies to manage and communicate with their operations wherever they may be.

A reason for this has been the fall in bandwidth costs, and broadband is getting cheaper and cheaper. Services can now deliver tens or even hundreds of megabits of bandwidth into individual homes for much less money than a 64Kb line that a whole factory might have used to run its operation only a few years ago.

Jenny Lane

In 1965 Gordon Moore stated that the number of transistors on a chip would double about every two years. And that has more or less remained true since then. As we write, a single chip can hold about 1 billion transistors each making 3 billion binary calculations per second.

There has' been a huge increase in the volume of data and data storage capacity required for this; secondly, there has been a significant decrease in the size and power consumption of hardware and finally manufacturing costs are falling significantly. The result is that there are more and more powerful computers in our lives, and even handheld devices can store gigabytes of data holding thousands of MP3 music, files or hundreds of films.

Sanjay Ravi

The internet is changing the way we access, buy and use applications. We go online and download the software we want onto our computer, like any other digital product. Increasingly we don't even have the software on our hardware, but visit an internet site and use that application as a service. The use of this Software as a Service (SaaS) model means that we may not need such powerful computers in the future.

We have seen the impact of off- shoring and the rise of India as the world centre of software development and application management. We are also seeing some of the smartest applications and services coming out of people's bedrooms; more and more experts are producing Open source software, which is becoming more and more popular, creating a real threat to the big corporations.

5.5 Read the text again. Say if the following statements are TRUE (T) or FALSE (F) according to the text.

According to Peter Wilson:

1) most countries are connected up with undersea cables. T F

2) many countries have unreliable mobile phone networks. T F

3) recently bandwidth costs have risen dramatically. T F

According to Jenny Lane:

4) Moore's predictions have been fairly accurate. T F

5) a typical chip can now hold 3 billion transistors.T F

6) both data storage capacity and power consumption have gone up.T F

According to Sanjay Ravi:

7) fewer people are going to computer stores to buy software. T F

8) SaaS will require ordinary users to have more powerful computers. T F

9) software development needs the support of a big corporation to succeed. T F

5.6 Match the words on the left with the words on the right to make pairs of words that often go together. The word on the left must go with all three words in the set. See the example.

1 access a chip, wafer, valley

2 download —— b an application, a network, an account

3 go с online, offline, on holiday

4 mobile d phone, telephony, broadband

5 silicon e a file, an image, a demo version

5.7 Complete the sentences using pairs of words from exercise. Make any changes that are necessary.

_ 1 Everyone has_______, so payphones are becoming redundant.

2 Many internet entrepreneurs from______________ in California are now turning their attention to alternative forms of energy.

3 Before you buy the program, you can__________just to see how you like it.

4 With a mobile broadband connection, you can _____any time and

anywhere.

5 Internet banking allows users to and check their balances.

6 How many transistors can you fit onto a___________?

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