
Over the last ten years internet access has become an integral part of our daily lives. You would be very hard pressed to find any office that doesn’t have at least some form of web connectivity now.
The government has a plan to increase the UK’s average broadband speed to greater than 24Mbps by 2015, thus making it is the fastest in Europe, but we have a lot of catching up to do before we can claim that title. Current average speeds are around 12 Mbps, although this is up from nine Mbps last year, largely due to the roll-out of faster broadband services such as fibre to the cabinet (FTTC).Why fast access is essential
The need to increase the broadband speeds in this country, especially for small to medium businesses, is a key aspect in the wider adoption of cloud- based services for day-to-day activities.- What are the current network traffic levels over your LAN? Make sure to look at average and peak loads on the network;
- How does that compare to your current internet access speeds? Consider the upload speed of your connection if it asymmetrical; and
- Do you need to guarantee speeds/service levels into the cloud provider? If so, you might want to consider a private connection that can run at speeds from 10Mbps to 10Gbps.
Infrastructure challenge
4G as a saviour?
One solution to this could be the new 4G mobile networks which, if you can get coverage, can deliver speeds up to 90 Mbps and the amount of fibre needed is far less (you only need run fibre to the base station rather than every house or street). However, at the moment the cost per Mbps for mobile data is too high to allow for widespread replacement of fixed broadband connections – but then again, they said the same about mobile phones compared to landlines when they were first released. Overall internet connectivity is getting faster, cheaper and more reliable. This trend will continue, and needs to, so that the UK can have widespread broadband adoption with an average speed above 20 Mbps. Without it we aren’t going to be able to take advantage of the new services (some of which we can’t even imagine at the moment) that scalable computing will allow, leaving us lagging behind nations such as Japan, Korea, Norway and Portugal, that have invested in their connectivity infrastructure. David Barker is founder and technical director of 4D Data Centres, which he founded at age 14, and a finalist for the Young Entrepreneur Award at the Growing Business Awards 2012.Share this story