ABSTRACT
A number of commentators have somewhat prematurely written off push technology as an idea that never really got off the ground, and one which never really found its niche. There are a number of reasons why push technology has, understandably, been viewed as creating more problems than it solves, and I would like to look at some of these later. But for the moment I would just like to mention one of the problems that critics identifiedthat of bandwidth. According to Bud Smith,55 dial-up users of PointCast (which is one of main push providers) may find that they have to pay for an additional hour of connect time each day; while users on a company network may find that the updates for PointCast cause network slowdowns for other users. But before people write off PointCast-and indeed push technology generally-too quickly, there was an article in Network Week56 in September 1998 which said that PointCast had introduced Intranet Server which achieved bandwidth savings with its caching manager of between 70% and 90%. The article says that ‘PointCast’s Internet newsdelivery software is being welcomed by a growing number of US corporations, and re-appearing in companies that had previously banned the product because it used too much bandwidth.’
