Apple Exposes Limitations of the Cloud

Sprint news item

Apple announced that it will allow customers to download the next release of Mac OS X, codenamed “Lion,” at its Apple stores. This move comes as a result of customer concern that bandwidth limitations or caps will limit their ability to download Lion through the Apple Mac store.

Apple’s move underscores how Nemertes’s predictions several years ago that bandwidth limitations would stifle Internet innovation are coming to pass. In that study, we concluded that if current trends were to continue, demand would outstrip capacity before 2012, we’re now seeing the direct impact of failure to upgrade access speeds, especially in rural areas of the US, coupled with bandwidth caps increasingly instituted by service providers on their overburdened networks. The rapid rise of mobile platforms such as tablets and smartphones, coupled with new services such as Hulu and NetFlix, are serving to exacerbate the bandwidth constraints that we predicted.

Access bandwidth constraints will impact IT plans in a variety of ways, including limiting the ability to leverage cloud-based services, especially for remote/mobile/teleworking employees, and a limitation in the ability of employees who use the Internet for application access to utilize services including video and backup. Expect even greater interest in application delivery optimization platforms for both wired and wireless in an effort by IT architects to reduce bandwidth demands for distributed applications.

• VoIP / Convergence
• Unified Communications