Home Broadband and the Cloud

I’m not sure that most people understand the extent to which our online experience has moved to the cloud – and this movement to the cloud means we’re using a lot more bandwidth than in the recent past. A huge number of online functions now reside in the cloud, when only a few years ago a lot of processing was done on our computers. The shift to the cloud is still an ongoing transition and there are still plenty of software packages that are not processed in the cloud, but it’s obvious that everything will eventually be in the cloud. Having software and applications in the cloud has made a big change in home bandwidth usage. If I have Twitter open in the background there are constant updates coming to my computer. The industry refers to this traffic as machine-to-machine traffic where updates are made between computers and the cloud without users taking any active steps to request an update. I read recently that Cisco says that this is the fastest growing segment of broadband usage as more and more functions are migrating to the cloud. It’s unlikely that cloud traffic will ever come close to overtaking video traffic in terms of the number of bits being sent, but it’s one of the reasons that homes are using more broadband every year.

[Doug Dawson is president of CCG Consulting.]