iCloud - Is it going to hurt access providers?

[jra at baylink.com (Jay Ashworth)]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Skeeve Stevens" <Skeeve at eintellego.net>

> I've been thinking about the impact that iCloud (by Apple) will have
> on the Internet.

Aw, c'mon; what a boring Whacky Weekend thread... :-)

> 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.

IOW: The Tragedy Of The Commons.  Yup; this is definitely going to be fun.

This is, I think, slightly different from the Netflix Instant arguments we
always have: the ones wherein it's pointed out that carriers aren't really 
entitled to charge Netflix because they've made improper bets on their
capacity engineering for What Might Come Next:

Apple really had better have already *known* what the engineering of
consumer grade Internet looked like (or several high level product and
engineering people are dangerously underqualified for their jobs), so
as this problem gets worse, and I concur that it will, the result will be
that they bet wrong.

Gambling means that sometimes you lose.  Alas, the costs won't be on
Apple.

This seems to be an ongoing situation: carriers discovering that they
also bet wrong on how to engineer the network: they've been making the 
beams thinner and thinner, and then along came something reasonably
rational... that was heavy enough to break them.

Anyone betting carriers will stop gambling quite so hard, and build 
networks the way John Roebling built bridges?

Cheers,
-- jr 'first woodpecker that came along...' a
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
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