iCloud - Is it going to hurt access providers?

Sun Sep 4 15:43:27 UTC 2011

On 9/3/11 04:20 , Skeeve Stevens wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> I've been thinking about the impact that iCloud (by Apple) will have
> on the Internet.
> 
> My guess is that 99% of consumer internet access is Asymmetrical
> (DSL, Cable, wireless, etc) and iCloud when launched will 'upload'
> obscene amounts of gigs of music, tv, backups, email, photos,
> documents/data and so on to their data centres.

It won't been obscene amounts, the free tier's quota is only 10GB. the
music which is probably the thing that moves into the the cloud the
fashion you described isn't moved into the cloud by uploading.

I'd expect the reads to dominate over writes so your traffic pattern
asymmetry is preserved.

> Now, don't misunderstand me, I love the concept of iCloud, as I do
> DropBox, but from an Access Providers perspective, I'm thinking this
> might be a 'bad thing'.

having customers that want to use your service is rarely a bad thing.

One of the things that this discussion point misses is that when you
operate at a distance from your data, you become rather sensitive to
latency. while apple is rather good about caching data locally, that
doesn't eliminate it from consideration.

> From what I can see there are some key issues:
> 
> *   Users with plans that count upload and download together. *   The
> speed of Asymmetric tail technology such as DSL *   The design of
> access provider backhaul (from DSLAM to core) metrics *   The design
> of some transit metrics
> 
> So basically the potential issue is that a large residential provider
> could have thousands of users connect to iCloud, their connections
> slowed because of uploading data, burning their included bandwidth
> caps, slowing down the backhaul segment of the network, and as
> residential providers are mostly download, some purchase transit from
> their upstreams in an symmetric fashion.
> 
> This post is really just to prompt discussion if people think there
> is anything to actually worry about, or there are other implications
> that I've not really thought of yet.

> …Skeeve
> 
> --
> 
> Skeeve Stevens, CEO - eintellego Pty Ltd - The Networking
> Specialists
> 
> skeeve at eintellego.net<mailto:skeeve at eintellego.net> ;
> www.eintellego.net
> 
> Phone: 1300 753 383 ; Fax: (+612) 8572 9954
> 
> Cell +61 (0)414 753 383 ; skype://skeeve
> 
> facebook.com/eintellego or
> eintellego at facebook.com<mailto:eintellego at facebook.com>
> 
> twitter.com/networkceoau ; www.linkedin.com/in/skeeve
> 
> PO Box 7726, Baulkham Hills, NSW 1755 Australia
> 
> 
> --
> 
> eintellego - The Experts that the Experts call
> 
> - Juniper - HP Networking - Cisco - Brocade
> 