§ Mr.Hobdenasked the Postmaster-General what plans he has for extending the facilities available for the transmission of data to and from computers.
§ Mr. BennI am glad to be able to announce some new facilities. An error-detection unit for use in the Datel 100 Service is now available at an annual rental of £120. It will improve the undetected error-rate from about 1 in 30,000 characters to about 1 in half a million.
The Datel 600 Service will become available in January, 1965. Five models of modulating and demodulating equipment will be available at annual rentals varying between £120 and £150. They will make it possible for data to be transmitted over telephone circuits at up to 150 characters per second.
A new Datel 2000 service is also being made available to help those customers who require data transmission on leased telephone circuits at speeds up to about 250 characters per second. This facility will be made available by specially engineered high quality circuits for which there will be supplementary charges ranging up to 37½ per cent. of the appropriate standard private circuit tariff, depending upon the special circuit characteristics that are required. These high quality circuits will also be available for other purposes such as facsimile transmission.
I hope these new services will make an important contribution to the fullest possible use of computer techniques in industry and commerce.