The Catalan community will need 3.5m telephone lines by the year 2000, representing installations at the rate of 160,000 lines a year, according to a new report from the Polytechnic of Catalonia, in collaboration with the Corporation Information and Development Centre and Telefonica de Espana SA, which will now presumably now have 30 years to implement its recommendations, having had its monopoly renewed for that period of time. The study was carried out to provide an outline of telecommunications development from now until the year 2000 and says that by next year all centres with more than 1,000 lines should be digitised and able to support ISDN. The report does not see a need to adapt current Spanish data transmission legislation until 1996, but calls for an improvement to public networks in the meantime, stating, for example, that user access speed to the Iberpac packet-switched network should be increased to 64Kbps, and that the node line speed should be upped to 2Mbps. Additionally, it calls for an increase in the number of Iberpac local centres and says that the back-up system and network security should be improved. Higher-speed city networks, with transmission rates of between 10Mbps and 100Mbps, are also called for as a result of companies’ increasing need to interconnect local networks. The report favours pan-European initiatives with regard to mobile communications, emphasising the fact that the large number of second homes in the Catalonia region should ensure success for the projects. With regard to ISDN, it says that in 1995 this system should be able to handle 20% of demand from the business sector and 70% by the year 2000. The installation of a wide-band infrastructure in a pilot area of Barcelona is planned, enabling large companies, service suppliers and university and research teams to develop applications for new technologies. On the less optimistic side, the report draws attention to the fact that value-added and advanced telecommunications services, such as data transmission, viewdata, electronic mail, electronic data interchange and video conferencing, have not been widely implemented in the region.
