Telefonica de Espana SA’s assistant director for marketing and new services Julio Linares announced that from June 15 the carrier’s interactive Asynchronous Transfer Mode network would become available to be leased in eight cities across Spain. Companies and institutions in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Bilbao, Valencia and three other cities now have the opportunity to exchange speech, data and images in real time using the advanced broadband communications system. In the future, on account of their interactive capacity, these networks will connect with the networks currently being set up for cable television, although for the moment they will remain separate, Linares declared. Telefonica also announced plans to strengthen its Infovia computer network access service (CI Nos 2,835, 2,874), which was formally launched only in February this year, and has already exceeded Telefonica’s initial expectations, with 80,000 users reported signed up by the end of April. Given this demand, Telefonica has decided to double Infovia’s current capacity, to enable the service to handle 6,000 calls simultaneously. The company will also create a second link with the US for access to the Internet. Infovia is at present the most commonly used pa th of access to the Internet from Spain and currently receives 2.3m calls a month with an average duration of 15 minutes each. The access service has attracted an equal number of business and private callers.
