The recent announcement by the government that it would look again at broadband and tackle those areas that were deemed not economically viable by the private sector is to be commended.
However, bandwidth is not the be all and end all when it comes to connectivity. In fact in many cases, a couple of megs symmetric bandwidth is more than enough to give you a decent service, whether you are terminal box set consumer on Netflix, a catch-up TV viewer or a business trying to get things done.
But what is often more critical is latency, expressed as ping times in milliseconds, which is the time it takes to contact your service provider’s server and from there to the Internet.
I work from home frequently and use a proprietary virtual private network client to connect securely back into office resources. And yes, I know we recently pointed out that this may not be as safe as was first thought, but howsoever, let’s plough on.
This service does not require the 65Mb/s download that my home broadband service delivers, nor indeed the 18Mb/s upload, but what it does benefit from is the 5ms ping time.
When I switched broadband provider last time, it was to take advantage of an ADSL2+ service that offered what, at that time, were blistering speeds. However, I warned the provider before switching that if the latency levels were not at or exceeding a certain threshold that they could simply take it away again.
It is latency that seems to be a key factor in businesses moving to the cloud
After a week or so of too-ing and fro-ing, it was sorted. It started out at 50ms+ then improved into the 30s, before dropping to the sub 20ms range, which was most usable.
My current service, with the same provider, is a fibre-to-cabinet service that offers the impressive 5ms mentioned earlier.
And it is latency that seems to be a key factor in businesses moving to the cloud. A recent survey by comms company Telstra found that the top drivers for cloud adoption improving security (71%), improving efficiency (68%) and reducing costs (57%) — no real surprises there then. But looking further down, the next drivers were optimising data and information (51%) and managing risk and compliance (47%).
Now these last two may sound a bit broad and possibly vague, but the issue of connectivity when considering a cloud option, whether a hosted private cloud, or full blown public cloud, is a major risk consideration. Is there enough bandwidth available, is it reliable enough and critically, is the latency good enough to meet the need of this solution? Will it provide timely access for data to be stored in the cloud and will it be open enough to allow applications to interact?
These are all questions that can be hard to answer, but which must be asked nonetheless.
The recent announcement by PlanNet 21 of a new data centre included the detail that direct fibre connections between customer premises and the datacentre were possible.
In many cases, this may the safest option, but in another way, it defeats the purpose of the cloud, as it means it is all the benefit of the cloud, but only if you can afford to plumb your very own lane to the information superhighway.
It perhaps also reflects the fact that connectivity can still be lacking in this country, requiring this kind of direct action.
Let’s hope that the government scheme can find a way to ensure that businesses everywhere can get access to low latency, adequate connectivity that will allow them to take full advantage of all the cloud, and the Internet have to offer.
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