Market potential of broadband communication in the printing and publishing sector

The "printing and publishing" sector is closely connected with many branches of industry and can provide important impulses for broadband applications in other sectors. The goals of the project were to identify application fields for switched broadband communication (SBC) and to estimate market potentials in this sector within a time horizon to the year 2000. The evaluation of the empirical investigation led to six application types: teleproofing, teleprinting, video communication, acces to external text and image data bases resp. picture archives, transmitting and discussing digital material, and telepublishing. The market potential for SBC will vary according to the social, economic, organizational, and technical development. With an optimistic estimate the SBC market potential will up to the year 2000 be approcimately 3000 connections in the "printing and publishing" sector. With a pessimistic estimate the SBC market potential will be approximately 150 connections. To what degree th e SBC will actually be realized does not least depend on the infrastructure and technology suppliers, who through th design of usage and framework conditions can influence time and quantitative factors for the SBC use.