Nasrollah Jahangard who was speaking during a visit to Gilan provincial data center, said that the province was among the 8 provinces having their own data center. He highlighted operation of provincial data centers as major infrastructures of national information network; “with operation of data centers and traffic switch inside the country, many services will be provided to public through a cloud network,” he added.
“Considerable efforts had been waged to transfer digital data hosting; currently, we host a domestic data traffic amounting to 40 per cent of the foreign traffic, with catapulting Iran to the top of Middle East countries in terms of hosting data traffic,” Jahangard told reporters.
“In past four decades, countries which had initiated renewal and modelling based on information technology have now long outfoxed other countries; for example, South Korea has been using information technology for development, with Samsung Electronics contributing 2 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP),” he asserted. “The global volume of market in information technology is estimated to be € 2,600bn, which will be almost doubled within next 5 years, with 60 per cent belonging to communications and remaining 40 per cent belonging to information technology,” added deputy-minister.
“The volume of total data generated by humanity is 8 zettabytes (staggering number: 10 with 21 zeros); the total global data traffic is 200 terabytes; in Iran, this is only a fraction of this huge volume (240 gigabytes per second),” Jahangard detailed on the most outstanding figures.
He also said that by 2020, ‘internet of objects’ would be a reality; “the next large wave of information technology will be internet of objects and data transfer by the next 5 years, and it is estimated that about 50bn communications will be active around the world, while currently, there is 3bn mobile communications,” Jahangard said. “Beginning in the last decade, countries with a fraction of their GDP allocated to information technology are now among constellation of developed industrial countries; the US has the largest ratio, with Greece having the smallest ratio in this respect, which is evident in the country’s economic recession and a lower place in terms of investments in IT,” he added.
In Iranian context, Jahangard said that the Fifth Development Plan had set as an objective access by 60 per cent of households to high-speed internet; “the global average speed is now 8 megabytes per second, and we have set this figure to 2 megabytes per second, with a goal of increasing domestic capacity to 42 terabytes and international capacity to 5 terabytes,” he said, “within two recent years, connection to home internet has been tripled; now 20 million mobile devices are connected to internet; we predict this figure to rise to 40 million smart phones by the next year (beginning March 21 2016),” he concluded.