HANDOVER OF WIRELESS CONNECTIONS

摘要

A connection between a communications terminal and a communications network is arranged such that on detection of imminent degradation (30) or loss of such connection, the utilisation of the connection is maximised in advance of such degradation. The network temporarily reallocates the maximum bandwidth that the terminal is capable of using to that terminal, which may result in a small temporary degradation of the bandwidth available to other terminals (33), and the terminal downloads (351) the data most likely to be required next to a cache (in the case of specific web pages, identified by recent accession, bookmarks, or hyperlinks from the page currently being viewed), or a buffer (if the data is being streamed) using this extra bandwidth made available.