Small companies will soon be able to subscribe to a new, high-speed business information service. The broadband service, to be co-offered by the Hongkong Productivity Council and Hongkong Telecom, will let users surf the World-Wide Web, send and receive e-mail, hold videoconferences and download information from special databases provided by the council, all at speeds of around one megabit per second, both up and downstream. A prototype of the service, called Productivity-on-Demand, was shown last week. A final version will be ready by the first quarter of next year. Subscriptions probably would cost about $1,000 per month, with an initial installation fee of about $2,000, which would include an ATM card. Prices have not been finalised. For businesses, the service offers a cheaper - and most likely faster - alternative to leasing a private data line, with the bonus of business information. A T1 (1.5 mbps) connection to the Internet costs about $7,000 per month for the physical circuit from Telecom, plus additional charges payable to the Internet service provider. The service uses Telecom's local 622 mbps asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. Video traffic would get higher priority over simple data traffic. Telecom also is creating services called Office-On-Demand and Software-On-Demand, both of which will let subscribers download software, paying a fraction of the total price per use and relying on the same broadband ATM network.
