Broadband initiatives - impact to your network?

Tue Jun 29 04:50:33 UTC 2010

Jonathan Feldman wrote:
> I'm one of the reporters who covers broadband and cloud computing for 
> InformationWeek magazine (www.informationweek.com), and it's 
> interesting to me that one of the issues with cloud adoption has to do 
> with the limited pipe networks available in this country. For example, 
> it's not feasible to do a massive data load through the networks that 
> are currently available -- you need to FedEx a hard drive to Amazon.  
> Holy cow, it's SneakerNet for the 21st Century!

What's wrong with this?  It's not feasible to build a network that spans 
many ISPs and backbones, capable of doing massive data loads, if the 
demand for these loads (e.g. "upload all our data to a cloud computing 
system") is infrequent and usually one-time-only - which it seems to 
be.  It's not as if there's a huge performance hit to using FedEx to 
solve this problem - what is the benefit to the customer in having it 
all happen within hours instead of 1-2 days? 

There are other, far more often desired or accessed services (e.g. video 
on demand, video teleconferencing) that absolutely need high performance 
big pipe bandwidth, whose needs can not be met with FedEx.  Customers 
who need to access or offer video-on-demand are far more willing to pay, 
month after month, for access to a high performance backbone.  Your 
average corporate customer isn't going to be willing to pay 
month-after-month for a super big super fast pipe (faster than they need 
for their everyday internet access purposes) just so that they can - 
once - upload their entire corporate database to "the cloud" faster than 
they can FedEx disks to their chosen cloud provider.

Look at the business case (or lack thereof) for the service before you 
ask "why isn't this available".  Unless/until there's a business case 
for many customers to pay for the service, there's not going to be any 
purpose in creating the product.

jc