Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Ongoing Access with Speed Constraints: The speed with which
folks can access the Internet also plays a role in the overall quality
of their computer access. In some cases, a slow speed may reflect
technical challenges, but in other cases the issues may be more re
lated to politics or social circumstances.
Case Study 6
A university in a modern, but geographically isolated, country provides free
computer accounts and Internet access to all faculty, staff, and students. Due
to transmission limitations, Internet connections with international sites are of
ten quite slow, and it may take several minutes to download files that are sev
eral megabytes in size. Even typing simple text through an Internet connection
may involve several seconds delay; that is, if you type something into a win
dow, it sometimes takes 30 seconds for your text to appear in your window
due to communication delays.
Sometimes slow speeds arise from geographical distances or lim
itations in network capacities. In Case Study 6, everyone at that
school had Internet access, and that connectivity worked very well
for many local applications. However, other Web applications re
quired considerable interaction with servers at a distance (in an
other country), and sometimes this work took a long time, even for
simple tasks. This time delay had several consequences. Sometimes
a user would decide not to pursue an application in anticipation of
long delays. At other times, a user would set her or his schedule to
take advantage of anticipated periods when communications might
work relatively well. In the case study situation, for example, con
nections outside the country generally were much faster during
mornings, and the connections slowed down in the afternoons and
evenings. Sometimes work in the morning might proceed three or
more times faster than the same work in the afternoon. Overall, al
though users theoretically had access to computers and the Internet
at all times, in practice, they had good quality access only at certain
times throughout any day, and were often pressured by the slow
connection to skip or delay work that came up during heavy
Internet hours.
Easy Ongoing Access with HighSpeed Technology—Almost: As
we've moved through these case studies, you've seen that a variety
of social forces can impact accessibility to the Web. Included in
these influences are social problems unrelated to government
