THE EXPLOSIVE GROWTH of the Internet poses a "life-or-death" challenge to telephone companies, according to a report from the Cambridge, England-based consultancy Analysys.

The report said the Internet threatens to weed out phone companies that fail to meet the demands of the new technology-since by 2003, more than 25 percent of international call minutes are forecast to be carried ove r the Internet. The report put this ensuing market's worth at $7 billion.

Analysys said telecommunications companies that hope to exploit the huge commercial potential of the Internet must fundamentally reinvent themselves. "Operators need to abandon old prejudices as well as learn new skills, and drag themselves out of the dark ages of the public switched telephone network and into the Internet age," said the report.

JEM COMPUTERS (Cambridge, Mass), an online PC seller, offers the "Techies' Workshop," a Web-based site of demo, used, defective and discontinued computer miscellany. Great deals abound.

APRIL 6-9: Comdex/Japan '98, featuring Object World, will be at the Nippon Convention Center (Makuhari Messe) in Tokyo. The site has info on object technology and client/server computing. Japanese and English versions are available.

"ON THE INTERNET TODAY, since cryptography is hardly used, any organized crime outfit or terrorist organization can rather easily break into banking systems and steal money from people's accounts.

"A more-sophisticated terrorist could decide to shut down the world's trading networks in order to cause severe damage to the world economy. This is possible because we're not using strong cryptography widely.

"I think that when companies realize there is this huge risk they are opening themselves to, they are going to force their customers to talk to them in a secure manner."

- Sameer Parekh, president, C2Net, and encryption guru

THOMAS PUBLISHING CO. (New York) offers SoluSource, an online catalog for objective product information, which features innumerable catalog pages from OEMs. The search engine allows users to conduct searches without having to adhere to a fixed hierarchy.

NTE ELECTRONICS (Bloomfield, N.J.), which is focused on the replacement semiconductor business, has updated its site. You can locate more than 300,000 electronic components used in the maintenance, repair and operation (MRO), OEM and consumer-repair markets by dropping in.

PLATFORM COMPUTING CORP. (Toronto), specializes in work-load management in distributed and heterogeneous comput er systems.

SCOTTISH ENTERPRISE, in Glasgow, offers a site to entice system-on-chip designers to move to the growing "Silicon Glen." Find news and information on the companies and the quality of life there by visiting the site.

THE INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTONICS ENGINEERS (IEEE) has partnered two of its best in-house systems guys. They have produced a powerful site, called, appropriately enough, "Wayne & Mitch's Windows 95 Help Page."

Mitchell J. Sharoff and Wayne Li are programmers/systems analysts at IEEE, who do all the tech support for the editors and production staff that publish many of the IEEE magazines, including Spectrum .

Since the two support not only Win 95, but also NT, Macs and Unix, the site offers engineers help in all areas.

Topics run the gamut from anti-virus to Win NT problems, with help on hardware, plug-and-play, modems and everything in between.

Each topic is set up as a Web chat forum page-where Sharoff and Li offer their own tips, and other engineers contribute online as well on all the latest developments.

There's also a live chat area available for online real-time help.

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