Telsyte researchers said a new study revealed that almost 40 percent of corporate and government entities utilise network connections at 64Kbps or lower. The study also revealed less than a third of large corporate and government organisations had access speeds of 2Mbps or more.
"I have so many customers who would dearly love to have higher bandwidth connectivity but don't have the budget," Telsyte analyst Shara Evans told ZDNet Australia. "In some cases they do see the business case but it comes down to dollars and cents. Even if they see the business case they may not be able to get the budget for that business case.
"In other words, faster links might allow increased productivity, but this is not necessarily visible to the IT department's bottom line," she said.
Evans said there would be a huge leap in the size of the frame relay market if all frame relay connections were shifted to a higher speed at the current price.
-Today, the Australian frame relay market is worth over AU$700 million per annum. However, if frame relay access links migrated to 2 Mbps connections ââ,¬" using existing committed information rates (reserved bandwidth for site-to-site connectivity) ââ,¬" the market would be worth over AU$1.6 billion. If committed information rates rose to just one quarter of the access speed (512 Kbps) the market would be worth close to AU$2 billion," she said.
In contrast to recent reports on a burst in residential broadband uptake, Evans said the corporate broadband market had seen a steady growth over the four years the study had been conducted.
"In the corporate space I'm starting to find customers buying business grade DSL for access links," she said, adding that the two markets could not be directly compared because services were often not marketed as broadband but as frame relay or managed IP services, but still utilised high speed DSL as the underlying connectivity.
The study involved interviewing 36 of the top data service providers in Australia to determine how many connections their customers had, and at what speeds.
another beat up by a company looking to put themself in the light..
if they really have all these frame relay customers they would know that most companies pay for a 64k and 128, 256k connections but with a CIR of 0k. basically they pay for the equipment but for 0k bandwidth but the frame can go up to what they have asked for if their is free bandwidth available.