the tindog coffeehouse

So I’m chugging along in my month-long experiment to measure my home Internet usage while simultaneously cursing the very thought of having a usage limit imposed by my ISP, and all of a sudden the question smacks me upside the head: What about cloud computing?

“Cloud computing” is one of those fancy Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?) buzzwords for software that runs from a web server on the Internet instead of your local computer.  It extends beyond web-based email or even blogging.  Google has a whole suite of web-based applications (Calendar, Google Docs, Picasa, etc.).  Adobe has rolled out Acrobat.com as a web-based collaboration tool that integrates with their Acrobat products.  They also have Photoshop Express, an online photo storage and editing portal.  And Microsoft has their Office Live online application suite.  Those are just a few examples.

And then there’s Midori, Microsoft’s experimental web-based platform that could possibly one day replace Windows.

Where do all these things fit in a world of metered Internet access?

The answer is, they don’t.  You can’t move your applications, let alone your OS, to the web if the meter’s running every second.  It’s gotta be one or the other.  The Internet of the future will either populated by web-tethered applications and appliances, allowing for a seamless integration of data across multiple platforms; or it will resemble the Internet of the past, with its dial-up connect-on-demand limitations.

Something really weird has happened since beginning this experiment.  Even though my ISP doesn’t currently set any usage limits, just knowing that my usage is being monitored has drastically affected how I think about the Internet.  I’m hyper-aware of every song or video I download, every website I visit, every desktop application that polls the Internet for updates.

It used to be in the early days of home Internet access that a dial-up account included a limited number of minutes.  As you used it, you unconsciously counted each minute spent online so that you wouldn’t hit your limit before the end of the month.  Now imagine that same scenario but with a limit based not on minutes but on megabytes.

With a limited number of bits you can push or pull over the wire, are you going to waste them downloading a movie from Netflix or uploading the pictures of your kid to Shutterfly?  Are you going to use them to watch your favorite TV show on ABC.com or Hulu, catch up with your friends on Facebook, or talk to a loved one over Skype?  (NBC has already warned visitors about viewing Olympics coverage online if their bandwidth is metered.)

The irony of this metered bandwidth crap is that the same companies pushing for it (AT&T, Time Warner, etc.) are the ones that have the biggest vested interest in keeping it wide open.  AT&T, for example, is heavily promoting its U-verse service as a way to compete with Verizon’s FiOS and “triple-play” services offered by many cable companies.  If AT&T then put a cap on that Internet usage, that doesn’t exactly fit in with their “Your World Delivered” mantra, does it?

Metered bandwidth may become a reality through much of the U.S. at some point in the near future, but cloud computing is already here and growing.  The two are not compatible. Which side do you think I’m on?

Previously:
Metered broadband: an experiment
Bandwidth experiment, day 2: throttled?

Updates (both via Ars Technica):

1. AT&T is launching it’s own cloud computing initiative, again reinforcing the theme of moving applications and data to the web.  While the initiative is for the enterprise while presumably any bandwidth caps would only apply to residential accounts, it seems very hypocritical to push for cloud computing on the one hand, while punishing customers for using the Internet with the other.  Translation: They just want more money from everybody.

2. A researcher at the University at Minnesota has shown that Internet traffic growth rates are stagnant or possibly falling, while transmission rates are declining.  He suggests stimulating traffic growth, in essence increasing demand for Internet usage to meet the supply.  As the article mentions, though, that might not be such a good thing for ISPs who have struggled to provide adequate bandwidth to the last mile.
   

   Any day now, when everyone has fiber to the premises (*cough*), bandwidth caps and throttling issues should hopefully become relics of the distant past. The core has plenty of bandwidth and is growing along with traffic, so once that last-mile gets expanded into an eight-lane superhighway, everything should be copacetic. Until then, we’ll continue to see enlightened policies like 5GB monthly caps.