Forecasting international telecommunications traffic by the data translation method

In forecasting the future international telecommunications traffic for individual countries, a global international view may provide a better long-range view of future trends rather than one based on observing individual countries separately. We propose a data translation method to achieve this. The method properly translates the traffic data per person for a group of countries along the time axis and ‘joins’ them together to form a single logistic or exponential forecasting curve. A necessary and sufficient mathematical condition for the method to be applied is given. Estimation of these curves is then considered. Forecasts are briefly shown for the telephone and telex examples, which demonstrate the improved accuracy that can be achieved relative to simple models based on individual country's trends.