Cloudy Thinking » Blog Archive » Fast Uplinks Make Sense

Fast Uplinks Make Sense

If you read my Symmetric Gigabit Fiber Access post, you already know that new “active star” fiber solutions deliver up to gigabit Ethernet bandwidth to a residence, where it splits out into several 100 Mbps Ethernets.

A service provider can (if they are smart…) offer a radically new service: very speedy upstream network connections, at a very reasonable per month price.

Remote file backup is one obvious driver for fast upstream bandwidth. There’s a comprehensive review of online backup at TechCrunch. They compare 13 different services (and the list is growing).

Service providers tend to freak out about opening up the spigot from the residence or small business to the network. They fear a punch or new servers will flood their connection to the Internet. That’s a legitimate fear, but it can be addressed with a creative price structure.

In order to offer remote backup that’s fast and cheap, the service provider could cap the amount of data that can be transmitted upstream per day. I’m thinking a few gigabytes per day, say 5 GB or so. If they really get creative, they could allow me to bump up my allowance for a given window of time for a small adder fee.

Phone companies are VERY GOOD at doing billing. This would e apiece of cake for them.

A service provider somewhere will get a clue and innovate to deliver the bandwidth users need for remote backups. It will be a huge success.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 7:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Buck Graham

Remote backup is an application that I really hadnt considered but is absolutely on the money. I, too, am a believer that more bandwidth will be required from the subscriber to the ‘net but to date I have only listed:

Residential microservers being more common. Examples of these are security devices, sensors, activators, and more traditional server functions that are being offered toward the Internet.

Video attachments in email.

Complex gaming systems and games that host thousands of players.

Micro video magazines being authored from the home.

The 1000Mbps vs 100 Mbps Actiuve Star Ethernet is intriguing not only from the bandwidth perspective but also from the interface latency perspective. Its seems to me that hardcore games would simply devour the service since it gives them a significant speed advantage.

Ron, thanks and good luck with your blog.

-Buck
Jason

Why am I thinking about remote backups again? First was my recent hardware issues, for a while I thought about scrapping my desktop and only being left with my laptop. I would also like to make the desktop into a media PC and could use its disk space. There are several gigs of backups on it that could be better used for a hard disk recorder. This would make my laptop the only copy of my data, I am not comfortable with this, a laptop is fragile and prone to theft. If I was to make it my only PC I’d need proper backups. Now there’s a viable place to backup things offsite.
http://blog.eronj.com/2006/03/14/amazon-s3-needs-fast-upstream-pipes/ Cloudy Thinking » Blog Archive » Amazon S3 Needs Fast Upstream Pipes

[...] The appeal of fast, symmetric connectivity is not a new idea here at Cloudy Thinking. See also this item. [...]
Scott

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