The BT ‘Race to Infinity’ is a new fibre optic broadband roll out that promises to deliver up to 40Mb fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) internet to its customers around the UK, at no extra cost. BT has pledged that this service will reach over 10 million users by 2012, or more specifically for the start of the London Olympics. Of course fibre-optic broadband is not new, companies like Virgin Media having been offering their service for over 3 years, however their coverage is limited to ‘Virgin Media Areas’.
The widespread introduction of this high speed or ‘Next Generation Access’, could see more and more business look into the Online Backup market. This is due to a myth that you need ‘fast’ Internet connections to utilise an Online Backup solution. Whilst this is the case for many low tier products, enterprise offerings such as Asgira that use WAN optimisation techniques to ensure that large volumes of data can be protected over modest connections.
This myth, although false, has caused many companies to fail to even look into the Online Backup market. However, as the uptake of this high-speed Internet connection increases, it is expected that the interest in Online Backup and cloud solutions in general will also increase among the SMB market as their Internet connections increase in speed without the extra costs.
These extra demands in Online Backup, would then raises issues with software’s back end scalability, i.e. just how well will some service providers be able to cope with the increase in storage requirements? The ability to cope depends entirely on the software, backend hardware and the expertise of the company employees.
Could this high speed internet roll out spell the end for old fashioned, out of date and unreliable tape backup once and for all?
