What Good is the Cloud with Capped Bandwidth?

If some companies are to be believed, we all belong in the cloud. That includes our information, documents, photos, music and sometimes, even our movies. Either by phone or at home, we can use a lot of bandwidth, and with companies shifting some major focus to the ‘cloud’, that means data caps are going to become a huge problem, fast.

A friend was complaining to me the other day about his Internet service in Melbourne, Australia. While he pays similar rates as we do here in east coast Canada for standard packages (~$60), he gets a mere 60GB of bandwidth to use each month. That, on top of the fact that his Internet isn’t even 100% reliable, with two drop-outs in the past month alone. This is not the kind of ideal scenario for cloud users.

I am one of the more fortunate who’ve scored an unlimited package – especially since the only other local ISP offers an 80GB package for around the same price. Though our net is a bit slower than it could be with the competitor, the stress of worrying about our bandwidth is non-existent. Our ISP doesn’t even offer a meter for us to track our usage…. that’s how little of concern it seems to be.

I can eat up a couple of hundred gigabytes per month. I download a lot of games on Steam, download different Linux distros to test out, backup Techgage to local machines often and with iterations, watch a fair amount online, and do other things that equal up to a lot of bandwidth usage. In fact, during the first 20 days of June, I’ve used 225GB of bandwidth… just me.

Add in other family members, and I’d hate to picture our total monthly usage, but again, it doesn’t seem to matter to our ISP. But it does matter to most others, and that’s the problem cloud computing is facing. In fact, I’d go as far to call capped bandwidth a brick wall, because if it remains, people are either not going to be able to use the cloud to its full potential (some might argue that’s been the case for a while), or they’re going to face overages. The other ISP in my town, featuring the 80GB limit, charges $1.50 per 1GB gone over. Is it just me, or is that purely asinine? Its biggest package? 175GB of bandwidth, at 70 up and 2 down, for $99. Lots of speed, only to reach your bandwidth limit that much faster.

And again, in many places, those kinds of prices seem good. In others, not at all. In most of Asia, no one even knows what a bandwidth limit is, and the overall stability and speeds offered are much better than what’s offered here. To me, that’s a problem on its own, but the fact that cloud computing is heading towards hitting a brick wall that shouldn’t even exist, is a reason for concern.