Broadband and the Cloud
Watched a Scottish BBC news item on t’telly tonight about broadband speed.
It seems that the average speeds across the country are about 2Mbps download with some place like Northern Ireland being less that that or indeed, crap!
Some bloke who works in a little village up northern Scotland has to take his boat out to cross a loch just to receive email.
Now don’t get me wrong. I know there are the infrastructure arguments about the UK roll-out of BT’s 21CN network etc etc yawn yawn and how much it will cost. That’s for another blog post.
The real point is that to me, this guy in his boat and many many others like him are the ideal candidate for the hosted/cloud Exchange or Sharepoint. He and his fellow company people may turn over a healthy amount by designing the next big engineering marvel. Just so happens they are geographically spread. They like to live in peaceful remote places. Just one scenario, as is the traditional ten people in a city office sharing info.
How the hell will the cloud work when the usual even business class broadband in this country is so crap. Yes you can buy reliability nowadays, but we need more bandwidth and speed. Try cloud Sharepoint over an ADSL connection whilst looking at your cloud Exchange mailbox and surfing the web. Oh dear….why is this so slow. The data center may have loads of bandwidth to t’internet but that matters not once it’s out there and needs downloading.
And before anyone suggests that the client should just go and get a T1 or leased line or whatever bandwidth rich connection…well I don’t know of many clients who would swallow that cost just to move to the cloud!
