Real Time Services

  

Real time services are websites that are constantly updated to tell you and update you of a certain subject. Real time services are websites like e-news, plain arrival updates, traffic updates and weather forecast. These websites are now very useful. They are used world wide everyday.

I have looked at one specific real time service; i have looked at Jam cams.

Jam cams

This is a website that has live updates of the traffic and jams on the big motorways. This information is very helpful to anyone who wants to travel somewhere at that moment. It works by people collecting the information from the cameras and constantly updating the website.

There are many advantages to this; people need to know what is happening now and where it is happening. These websites let them know that. It also saves the business a lot of money as if these websites did not exist people would have to find out by phone and the business will have to have many phone lines and it would cost them a fortune to run this, these websites are better and a cheaper way of providing the information.

However there are some disadvantages. The websites are updated regularly however the timing is not precision. They are always a couple of minutes out. This is because the people collecting the information have to have the time to collect the information and then update the website.

This is a screen shot of the BBC website and their jam cams for the M5 J15 you can see on this picture that the roads are moving smoothly, however if you look on the website in very small writing on the image you can see the time it was updates and the time is 12.47pm. The time is now 12.51pm and yet no update.

Another way of getting to these websites is with your mobile phone. An amazing new technology has come out where people can browse the Internet wherever they are on their own mobiles. There is a GPS on the new smart phones now and this means that people can track where they are there and then. So there phone are almost like a sat nav as well as everything else new smart phones do.