There will be twice as many developments in half the time in Bermuda's telecommunications market, than has been seen in the last two years, Internet (Bermuda) Ltd. (IBL) general manager Peter Durhager told Hamilton Lions Club members yesterday.

Long distance telephone rates should continue their downward trend and new, high speed capacity services being offered in the City of Hamilton will enable new products not even being considered at present.

Mr. Durhager also said the merger between Business Systems Ltd. and IBL will happen next month bringing efficiencies, better products and more service.

Telecommunications changes will also create more emphasis from the company on growing their business outside of the Island.

The faxSav product offered by IBL has allowed 250 companies signed up for the service to save some 50 percent or $400,000 in long distance fax charges in the last 10 months.

Mr. Durhager said GlobalConnect, an alternative to traditional lease lines, is bringing middle-tier companies new services that they were unable to afford in the past.

And he noted, "One of the things we are going to be announcing in a week or so is called IntelliRoam, which allows Bermuda-based businesses and consumers to dial a local `phone number from just about anywhere in the world, connect through the Internet in a secure manner back here to Bermuda, authenticate themselves as valid users and allow them to connect to the Internet and do anything they need to do while on line.

"They could be in London and they could connect themselves to their local service.'' He said the convergence of text, data, graphics, video, voice and other sound will bring competition in "a new market space'' or new environments.

Mr. Durhager said that Bermuda's offshore financial position, together with regulatory and jurisdictional issues, could naturally lend itself to Bermuda becoming a global data management centre as further development brings new foreign currency earning opportunities.

He said, "Business to business transactions will take place in Bermuda and we believe that those transactions on a global basis will exceed $8 billion this year already. Predictions have those types of transactions exceeding $100 billion within the next three to five years.

"There's going to be explosive growth and Bermuda stands to benefit ultimately from that growth and from our positioning.

"We do believe that Bermuda has every opportunity to become a hub for offshore electronic commerce transactions and we intend to play a major role in that.'' Mr. Durhager also repeated what he called "an aggressive prediction'' that by the year 2000, less than one percent of telecommunications traffic will be voice calls.

He said, "Even if that is an aggressive prediction, we can expect that there will be massive change that will impact businesses and our lives, as parents and as consumers. It will impact Bermuda.

"We need to embrace that change. We've got a lot of good things going on in this marketplace in terms of choice, additional capacity and in terms of positioning Bermuda for the future. There are a lot of people hard at work on both the governmental level and at the private level to make that happen. "A lot of that is being driven by the advances in technology, but it is also driven at the end of the day by consumers.'' See story on Page 9