iCloud - Is it going to hurt access providers?

[mohacsi at niif.hu (Mohacsi Janos)]

On Sat, 3 Sep 2011, 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.
>
> 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'.
>
> 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.


In my opinion. Home networking (including personal clouds) have to change 
the brain damaged model of asymmetric tail technologies. Giving back the 
original peer-to-peer nature of networking the asymmetricity of the 
access technologies will not be tolerable in such a level (1:10) we have 
today. Maybe 1:2 should be more acceptable.

You don't have to worry bout this changes, but access provider cannot 
claim any longer 100MBps (while upload speed ~10 Mbps), but probably 60-70
Mbps (with upload ~ 30 Mbps).... They have to retune access services.


Best Regards,

 		Janos