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RE: The disruptive nature of cloud computing

geoweb@... 13th Aug 2009

Many activities are underway to shape/reshape Internet use as you all know it. Over the last year some of you have been made aware and/or have seen activities on throttling in the news or in your daily lives. Another CRTC proceeding relating to the Internet in Canada required Telecom providers (Bell/Telus/etc.) to provide ISPs with wholesale service speeds that match those that they offer to their own retail customers. Specifically, Bell has been directed by the CRTC to provide matching speeds which would allow us all to have more flexibility in our day to day online requirements. Instead of adhering to these directives, Bell decided to take this issue to the federal Cabinet and at the same time file a tariff application with the CRTC proposing to introduce Usage Based Billing (UBB) on its wholesale customer accounts.

What does this mean for our consumers of geospatial data?

Bell provides resellers with last mile, wholesale DSL access services, which resellers uses to provide you with your Internet access. If Bell were to be allowed to introduce UBB on this service, a cap of 60GB would be imposed on all of its users, with very heavy penalties per Gigabyte afterwards (multiple times more than our current per Gigabyte rate of $0.25/GB on overages). This would inherently all but remove Unlimited internet services in Ontario/Quebec and potentially cause large increases in internet costs from month to month.

Impact on Cloud Computing ?

Given that GIS data sets are GB in size and often TB in size, the cost to use cloud computing becomes expensive to use.

The internet has become a main source of location based services, geospatial data, and sharing of data when it is needed to support critical infrastructure management services. Coupled with streaming of live video from the site 60 GB is quickly becoming a small amount of data. Capping, reducing, and throttling the consumers access to data, inhibits the growth of the cloud computing. Caps should be increases - not decreased to enable effective use of cloud computing capabilities. Capping data is essentially denying access to information to everyone except those who can pay.

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2009/2009-484.htm Read it and weep. Bell gets to charge resellers UBB.

Cloud Computing is now a distractive technology - interesting in concept - probably the right way to go - but the new business model introduced by UBB now makes it cost prohibitive