- Image by Gary Hayes via Flickr
Last week the FCC received flack from incumbent service providers and Congress for setting a 4 Mbit/s minimum speed for their definition of broadband because they realized that consumers are spending more time exchanging media with web sites hosted in the cloud. Countries with the foresight to offer a minimum of 10 Mbit/s bandwidth by 2015 will continue reasonable GDP growth.
LONDON, July 26, 2010 – With the world moving toward cloud computing where services and data are delivered over broadband networks, many experts are concerned that countries are setting minimum bandwidth limits too low for future participation in the global economy.
These concerns were raised at a recent announcement by the U.K. government when discussing its objective to provide universal access at 2 megabits per second by 2015 – three years later than had been pledged by the previous administration.
Critics said 2 megabits per second was inadequate today and likely pathetic in 2015, given the rapid expansion of services delivered remotely from cloud computing models designed to share information technology resources efficiently between multiple consumers.
Cloud computing is the emerging model for delivering services as a utility to consumers and smaller firms in particular, mining common expertise and resources to cut costs and deliver expertise that otherwise could not be afforded. But like other utilities such as electricity, water and gas, cloud computing requires an efficient delivery network operating at the right capacity.
