Broadband Britain and Cloud Computing

There's been a great deal of talk recently about the return of the 'Cloud Computing' dream. Basically, applications and data held on the internet and accessed by consumers via browsers wherever they want.

A lot of the most recent discussions have been driven by the hotly anticipated launch of Google's GDrive (and Microsoft's competing Windows Skydrive). Both are online storage service where consumers will be able to store photos, documents and multimedia.

However one of the biggest issues that's rarely discussed is the fact that if more and more users will be uploading large files to the internet - the current breed of broadband service are not designed to cope with this. Most consumers purchase broadband based on the headline downloads speed (eg 8Mbs all the way up to the 50Mbs on offer via some current optical providers). The average download speed in the UK is 3Mbs (figures broadband-expert). But the average upload speed is only a tenth of this at a meazly 296Kbs (or 0.296Mbs). Just think about how long updloading a photo to a social networking site takes in comparison to downloading a music track.

This is because broadband in the UK is ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line) meaning that the connection is asynchronous; larger/faster in one direction than the other. And this worked perfectly when the majority of content is delivered to the user.

But for the dream of cloud computing and, more specifically, online file storage - broadband providers will need to consider SSDL (synchronous digital subscriber line) services delivering much faster upload speeds. And this is something that's been missing from much of last week's report on Broadband Britain.