INTERNET - The case of the incredible shrinking world

I prefer to work from home when possible and applaud the fact the government has decided to promote the teleworking initiative to UK businesses.

Unfortunately, it hasn't recognised the more urgent need to invest in providing the necessary bandwidth infrastructure to make it happen.

In the same way the government accepts responsibility for providing an adequate transport infrastructure, it needs to tackle the task of relieving the traffic jams on the infamous communications superhighway.

Technology is no longer the barrier to the explosion in teleworking which has been predicted. Three dynamics are happening in the market to make it possible to take your office home. First, the widespread accessibility of the internet as a common medium to access and send data has made remote access affordable and available to the masses. A second part of the jigsaw is provided by the advent of network-centric computing, where data is processed centrally on a server and displayed on the client. It means bandwidth requirements at the client level are minimal so even a mobile phone is capable of becoming a thin client. Network-centric computing means it is now viable to transmit large amounts of data over low bandwidth lines, speedily and cost-effectively.

The third development has been the ability to send audio and video images encapsulated in internet protocol (IP) packets over the internet. To communicate effectively, an employee needs access to three types of information: applications, voice and video.

The combination of internet access, with the ability to send not just data but video and audio data across a low bandwidth remote connection quickly and cheaply, means the remote worker will be able to communicate with their fellow workers around the world. For workers, it can be the isolation and inability to participate in face-to-face meetings which is the biggest obstacle to teleworking. The availability of video conferencing could change that.

The internet provides us with the ideal medium to deliver that capability to the desktop. Today, it's a simple operation to make a local call to an ISP and connect to another user anywhere in the world. The only problem is bandwidth available. Bandwidth is the crude oil of the future. Everything is achievable once we guarantee consistent bandwidth.

What does this mean for the office of the future? It will no longer be necessary to have separate methods of accessing data, voice and video.

All will be available via a single internet connection. This will release many office-bound employees from their workplace because it will be possible to hold a meeting between locations with full video links, access the same applications and speak with each other as if you were in the same room.

The H323 standard means that not only voice, but video can be framed in an IP package and delivered over the internet. The advent of technologies such as ADSL will offer bandwidths of between 2Mb and 6Mb to the doorstep of the future and WebTV will become viable for every household.

So what's holding us back? First bandwidth availability and second cost.

We must find a way to minimise the cost of connecting from home to the network to the internet by making a single local call and letting the internet take care of routing all the information.

So what relevance is this to the average dealer? Traditionally, dealers have been used to shipping preconfigured hardware. A different industry is opening up in offering consultancy services to organisations to enable them to implement this vision of the future.

Hot on the heels of the success of Citrix's WinFrame products comes Microsoft's own endorsement of this architecture in Hydra or Windows Terminal Server.

This will form a vital link in the chain to popularising the use of the network-centric computing architecture, enabling windows applications to be delivered to thin client devices of all sorts, ranging from mobile phones to wireless PDAs anywhere in the world.

The number of desktop devices is likely to reduce as a single thin client device becomes capable of delivering your communications needs, but new opportunities for resellers will evolve to provide audio and video-based applications to users.

So the next time one of your clients says the internet doesn't have a serious business use, you won't be short of an answer.

Yuri Pasea is managing director of KNS Distribution.