Fergus Cassidy

Watch this space

SO that was Christmas. As it came to a damp end in this neck of the woods, so did the increased speed noticeable since the last person switched off the office lights on the 24 December.

They're all back at work now which means getting on the net during the day from a measly dial-up from home takes as much patience as a radio operator on a missing Martian lander.

Still it was good while it lasted and I suspect that for many the extra speed has become an annual ritual anticipated like the arrival of Santa. It will also be great to bore youngsters to distraction in years to come with oft recited reminders of how those kids don't know how lucky they are.

"We used to have modems and paid by the minute". Luxury. "We used to wait until 6.01pm before we connected". Luxury. "20 of us used to share the same DIY computer and we connected using a command line script". But of course, the young people won't believe it.

Dial-up delight over the holidays was also much added to by the continuing collapse of television as a social cement. With dozens and dozens of stations and two to three televisions per house, the 20th century 'window on the world' has become nothing more than a small sky light.

So what better time of the year to avert the gaze toward the heavens and the space traffic jam building up on the Martian Road.

Alas poor Beagle2 decided to take its own extended Christmas holiday but the first of Nasa's landers phoned home in spectacular style. Beagle2 was a nice try by the European Space Agency (ESA). With a 25 December landing the world's media was willing it on, no doubt conscious of the fact that Christmas Day news stories are as rare as an unpulled cracker.

Fair dues to Nasa as well. Its Goliath mission to land not one but two landers on Mars, was left on a slow burn media wise to allow the European's David a fighting chance of glory.

Next time, who knows, but it doesn't come as a complete surprise that experience (and money) counts for a lot in the heavens - as it does on earth. So while the world's offices, factories and stock exchanges hit the snooze button, the traffic to and from Nasa's web servers went nuts.

Between Saturday 3 and Tuesday 5 January, Nasa's Mars mission site received 916m hits with visitors downloading 154m pages. The 1bn level probably came late last Tuesday or early Wednesday. This means that the site received almost half its yearly traffic in just four or five days.

Translated into data, the figures are even more mind boggling. It works out at almost 15 terabytes of information (a terabyte is a million megabytes). This is the equivalent of 20,000 compact discs which, if stacked without cases, would be more than 100ft high. To facilitate the problems with bandwidth mentioned earlier, Nasa replicates its content on more than 1,300 computers scattered throughout the world.

Mission spokeswoman Michelle Viotti was overjoyed. "We knew this mission would be a great opportunity to bring the excitement of exploring Mars directly to people. Six years ago, Mars Pathfinder allowed the world to participate in planetary exploration, and broke all prior internet records for web traffic. It looks like we may do it again, and this time we'll have even more to offer online so the public can share the adventure in real time."

While the timing of the missions obviously helped, the real hero of the hour is the net itself and its enormous growth.

In 1997, the Mars Pathfinder mission clocked up 47m hits in one 24hr period. The Polar Lander two years later hit 69m and the tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia early last year reached 76m. Estimates for the recent landings run at about 240m for the equivalent time period. That figure doesn't include traffic to the Beagle2 web portal and the possible figures had the mission been successful.

This is what the net, and the web in particular, is really good at. Just as well because television could only manage lip service. The British stations naturally concentrated on Beagle2. It was a British mission up until the day of the scheduled landing but from then on it quickly became a European mission.

There wasn't one programme over the holiday season which sought to capture the kind of audiences that the web traffic so clearly shows exist. Even the BBC's wonderful The Sky at Night (the longest running television series in the world) broadcast on the night of the successful Spirit landing only contained a brief mention before moving on to music composers and cosmology.

Television, in terms of the role it played up to now, may well have had its day. The window it provided on to the world has became too narrow and limiting. It is largely incapable of reflecting a world that is diverse, complex and so valiantly human.

So when Tim Berners-Lee, the man responsible for the third w in www, received a knighthood recently, it barely got a mention on TV.

Then again, television probably believed all along that he was a spacer.