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UK cash draining to US because of high Internet costs

And UK Unix programmers feel the pinch

The president of a major US Internet company claimed today Britain was losing huge amounts of money to the US because of poor bandwidth and infrastructure in the company. Jack Reynolds, president of Quik Internet, and a guest at IBM's S/80 launch near Heathrow, this morning, said that the large cost of connecting and the high charges associated with bandwidth were hurting UK industry, while all the money consumers would have spent was instead benefiting the United States. Reynolds said that government leaders were more interested in warning of the dangers of pornography than of taking immediate action to reverse the problem, he said. He said that IDC figures revealed that 60 per cent of products bought over the Internet were sourced from US Web sites. "People are buying books from Amazon.com over here," he said. "That's crazy". The poor infrastructure and the high cost of connecting were also linked to studies his group had done with small and medium sized businesses in the UK. He said that the lack of education and the level of understanding of the potential of the Internet was tiny compared to the US. These facts benefited his company however, said Reynold. The cost of Unix wizards to administer servers was on average 30 per cent higher in California than in the UK, he said. As a result, it had hired a group of UK programmers based in Liverpool to administer servers in the US. ® Tune into Cash Register and turn on to our daily Net Finance News

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