The cloud makes faster Internet of prime importance

Forget about conventional browsing, YouTube viewing, e-mail exchange and even most other mundane tasks you perform online like shopping or ebanking. This is but the easy part of Internet. There’s today a more pressing issue that requires significant increase in Internet speed of all kinds from the service providers. And no, 3G is not enough when it comes to mobile wireless, as a matter of fact 4G will hardly be too much asking.

There is a dire need for very fast Internet and for virtually unlimited download. This is directly triggered by the exponentially growing usage by consumers of cloud storage. If there’s any obvious trend in IT today this is clearly it — cloud storage. And it is requiring massive Internet “flow”.

It has already been the subject of this very column a few times this year. Cloud storage gives you access to your data anywhere, anytime, on any connected device, and your data is well protected from loss for it is automatically backed up. No more losing sleep over taking care of data backup sets or seeing your laptop’s hard disk suddenly die on you. You can even break and smash your devices into little pieces if you like, this won’t affect your files that are safely kept in the cloud.

Moving into cloud storage affects your Internet “consumption” just like adding several air-conditioning units to your house would affect your electricity consumption and current draw. It’s a big, significant jump that asks that the infrastructure be ready for it, given the massive additional power drain.

Using cloud storage means constant upload/download of files over the web. Working and saving a file means uploading it to your cloud storage area. Opening it from another location or computer means downloading it.

Each time you add a new device (laptop, tablet, smartphone…) to connect to your cloud storage for the first time, the entire contents of the storage area must be downloaded to this new machine. If you have say a total of 20GB stored in the cloud, a very common size by any standard, that will be a massive 20GB download at once on the newly added machine. When you think that most subscriptions in Jordan provide about a mere 40GB of total download quota per month, you easily see the problem and the limitation that follows.

The difficulty to address the issue lays in the fact that cloud storage usage and size are increasing much faster than Internet providers are increasing the speed they typically offer and the download quota they allocate to their subscribers.

This week Dropbox, one of the most popular if not the most popular cloud storage service, and in a rather bold marketing move probably aiming at sending a strong signal to the competition, has increased the storage offered with its basic pro subscription from 100GB up to 1TB, with no price increase! This is an incredible ten-fold increase. What Internet service on Earth is improving its speed and download quota ten-fold? And for the same price what’s more?

The fastest Internet speed in Jordan currently is 24mbps and is only available in some areas in Amman. Whereas this can be seen as relatively fast for simple web browsing and e-mail usage, this is the bare minimum acceptable for intensive cloud storage use. Not forgetting that this apparently good speed is for downloading only, not for uploading, the latter being usually about only one-tenth of the first. As for the monthly download quota, the pressure is on providers to give at least 100GB per month, and preferably unlimited bandwidth.

One way or another, and rather urgently providers of Internet service in Jordan will have to cope with the ever increasing demand and the pressure put on the network by cloud storage.