Cloud Society Broadband As A Barrier To Cloud Service Adoption
Cloud Society: Broadband as a barrier to Cloud service adoption
UK Broadband should focus on acceptability, not speed
Some interesting statistics lie buried on Page 40 of the Ofcom report (LINK: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/broadband-research/may2012/Fixed_bb_speeds_May_2012.pdf) into residential broadband speeds. Issued back in May, the detailed paper quite rightly applauded the 22% increase in UK average broadband speeds overall. “It is encouraging that speeds are increasing,” said Ofcom’s Ed Richards, as you would expect. The average is now 9.0Mbit/s, which (one would think) should be more than enough for most uses.
The fly in the ointment appears when one looks at the distribution of download speeds across the board. Over half of those tested have an average of up to 6Mbit/s, which illustrates that the headline figure is pulled up by a smaller proportion of homes which happen to have very high speed broadband connections, for example over fibre or cable. Only 37% achieve an average of up to 4Mbit/s, and 14% of those tested, distributed across the UK population, can only make use of 2Mbit/s or less.
Downloads are one thing – the “A” in ADSL2+ means “asynchronous”, and upload speeds tend to run at about 10% of downloads. In broad terms, a third of the connected UK population can upload data to the Internet at 300-400kbits/s, and a third of this group can upload at half that. To put the speeds into context, a basic video conferencing link requires 128Kbits/s each way, which uses up this latter group’s entire upload bandwidth.
In the context of cloud, the conclusion is stark. We can talk all we like about home working and the ability to get stuff done in coffee shops (the Wi-Fi in many of which will be dependent on a home broadband connection). But as with any other aspects of technology, cloud services need to ‘just work’, even as they are becoming increasingly bandwidth-hungry.
There’s a very simple factor at play here – that of lowest common denominator technology adoption. Work in a city-based office where bandwidth is no object, and you would be forgiven for believing that internal IT was no longer necessary and the future lay entirely in the clouds. Perhaps it does – but move outside of such an idyllic world and the varnish quickly dulls. If even one person in a 30-person team cannot access the facilities required to work, the entire team will suffer. So, as a result, facilities tend towards those that work, with the ultimate beneficiaries – end-users – pulling away from those that get in the way.
This isn’t a cynical rant, more a recognition that a threshold exists. Nobody’s really set this so I’ll take a flyer. According to the mathematicians at Zen Internet (LINK: http://www.zen.co.uk/business/online-data-backup/backup-solutions/data-transfer-times.aspx), transferring 1GB of data (about 15 minutes of HD video, for example) at 450Kbits/s would take about 5 hours – which is clearly too slow. Anything under an hour starts to be acceptable, i.e. about 2Mbits/s upload, or 20Mbits/s download. So, my thesis is that, for the full range of cloud services to be usable for home working, home broadband speeds need to reach 20Mbits/s for a significant proportion of this group of users.
Which, coincidentally, is about the speed the UK government is pitching as being ‘superfast broadband’ (LINK: http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/telecommunications_and_online/8129.aspx#superfast_broadband) – they’re saying 24Mbps, but its close enough. The plan is to roll this out by 2015 across the UK, but signs are this deadline is already slipping. My money’s on five years before the threshold is passed for the necessary proportion of the population. That is, to be clear, five years before many organisations can come to rely on remotely accessible broadband speeds for the range of cloud services they may want their employees to use.
Perhaps things will speed up; perhaps some innovative soul will come up with a way to use the network of copper cables criss-crossing the land in a more efficient way (for example, of the top of my head, by moving to asynchronous model above speeds of 10Mbits/s – you heard it here first). In the meantime, we shall all be forced to compromise, cloud services will disappoint compared to their promise and more gung-ho organisations my regret rushing too quickly toward an online-only approach. The UK government is already under the cosh (LINK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19057875) to start delivering on its broadband strategy. If it really is interested in increasing GDP, the sooner it can bring the majority past a ‘minimum necessary’ threshold, the better.