Australia's distant cloud
Summary: The National Broadband Network (NBN) will provide fat pipes into our homes, creating an appetite for more content, more quickly. Yet, 80 per cent of what we consume resides in the US. Won't we hit capacity problems?
The National Broadband Network (NBN) will provide fat pipes into our homes, creating an appetite for more content, more quickly. Yet, 80 per cent of what we consume resides in the US. Won't we hit capacity problems?
This week's Twisted Wire looks at the growth of the datacentre industry in Australia, and asks: is it enough?
International capacity will always be a bottleneck, unless more of the content we access is hosted locally. Caching and other network solutions can be part of the answer, but they are less relevant with the increasing use of real-time applications.
All of this may be good news for datacentre providers. Right now, there is more than $2 billion invested in building new centres. The downside for consumers is the relatively high cost of local hosting — electricity is expensive, and we don't have the economies of scale enjoyed in larger markets. There's also a local competitor who is greener, cheaper and well connected, and situated just over the Tasman.
In this week's program, you'll hear from:
Sean O'Halloran, CEO at Alcatel-Lucent Australia
James Spencely, CEO at Vocus
Mark Rushworth, CEO at Pacific Fibre.
Do you think datacentres are the next big opportunity for the Australian telecommunications industry? Is the current investment just the start of something much larger? Call the Twisted Wire feedback line on 02 9304 5198 to air your views.
Running time: 29 minutes, 30 seconds
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
With 37% of existing NBN fibre customers already choosing 100/40 Mbps fibre services, and 82% choosing speeds of 25/5 or faster, we already see possibilities for upstream-dependent services like file replication between two offices, video conferencing between multiple domestic locations and health services between homes and hospitals, none of which will consume international capacity.
I think the impact of international bandwidth will resolve itself in the market. It is certainly not an argument to deploy copper or coax in the era when fibre has only begun to show us what it can do.
This has been said by a handful of people inculding myself.
That you can't expect to get 10meg download speeds 24/7, when 99% of the stuff is always coming from overseas and there's no real backhual to handle such data loads between countries.
but you always have these Fud blockers saying otherwise all the time to the point they don't even understand what they are talking about anymore.