Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/52331 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
8th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of the International Telecommunications Society (ITS): "Convergence in the Digital Age", Taipei, Taiwan, 26th-28th June, 2011
Publisher: 
International Telecommunications Society (ITS), Calgary
Abstract: 
As public policies seek to advance deployment of enhanced broadband infrastructure as a means of acquiring economic advantage, the issue has arisen of the extent that additional economic performance accrues from increases in headline bandwidth speed in locations that are physically remote from the infrastructure hosting time-critical information services. For time-dependent applications, latency (the time delay in accessing data across a network) is correlated with the effective bandwidth (the actual speed of access), and thus impacts upon the economic performance of the application to the user. We extrapolated data for interactive web-based applications from Belshe (2010), where latency was found to substantially reduce the effective bandwidth available to the user of a typical web-based application, to estimate the effective bandwidth over a range of headline bandwidths and latencies typical of web-based transacting patterns in New Zealand. We find that the decreasing returns on effective bandwidth as headline bandwidth increases are further exacerbated by the higher levels of latency experienced as a consequence of New Zealand's distance from the bulk of the global infrastructure supporting web-based applications.The benefits of enhancing headline bandwidth through new forms of faster infrastructure were substantially reduced by the impact of the latencies typically experienced by New Zealand users accessing remote web based applications, and thus the economic benefits expected from investment in infrastructure in accessing enhancing those applications most impacting economic performance is likely to have been exaggerated; providing an insight into a constraint upon cloud computing and other web-enabled information systems.
Subjects: 
Internet
broadband
fibre-optic cable
regional economic development
HTTP protocol
JEL: 
O18
O33
R11
R12
Document Type: 
Conference Paper

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