Uunet's John Sidgmore preaches his technological gospel to Yvonne Chan

Uunet chief executive John Sidgmore is unequivocal about his faith in the Internet. As it doubles in size every 3.5 months, the Net's power will change the way business is done and in the process lead to an upheaval in the world's multibillion-dollar telecommunications market.

'If you're not scared of the 1,000 per cent a year growth, you don't understand,' he said.

Who should be scared? Not Mr Sidgmore, as his Virigina-based company Uunet is one of the world's biggest sellers of infrastructure - or bandwidth - for the Internet and stands to gain enormously from such growth. His company has been described by one industry newsletter as having 'more bandwidth than God'.

It is telecom companies, which he has admitted to 'hating' and 'fighting' in the past, which need to change the way they do business or else be washed out by a tidal wave of technology.

Mr Sidgmore holds many unconventional views about the future of telecoms which might be construed as either hype or visionary. It boils down to whether you consider the Internet as merely a toy for geeks or a revolutionary communications tool that has yet to reach its full potential.

Among Mr Sidgmore's beliefs: 'By 2003, voice will [take up] less than 10 per cent of the bandwidth in the world', shrinking to less than 1 per cent by 2008. By then, 99 per cent of all communications traffic will be carried on Internet protocol networks.

'Voice will be a niche application. In fact, we won't even know it's there. It will be insignificant.' That is not to say that he predicts people will stop talking on the phone. Rather, voice communications would increasingly take place in a digital format - mobile phones do so already - or use the Internet as a cheap way to travel across the globe.