Re:Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
by kijin on Thursday March 08, 2012 @10:09AM
(#3679959)
So, the company gives you a 2TB external hard drive for free, on the condition that you use 1TB to store your own data and 1TB to store copies of other people's encrypted data? Sounds interesting, until you get a huge bill for bandwidth overage. I have barely 100GB of bandwidth to spare every month (out of a total of 300GB/mo), so if that hard drive gets filled in less than 10 months, we've got a problem. They're effectively pushing their costs onto ISPs, who in turn will push their costs onto customers. Restoring backups is also going to be pretty slow if your data is stored on somebody's 10M/1M DSL line. They'd better market it in countries where everyone has 100M and no bandwidth caps.
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Re:Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
by jtolds on Thursday March 08, 2012 @11:52AM
(#3680451)
ISPs pay for bandwidth leaving and entering their network. inter-network bandwidth is actually free for them, so it's very likely spacemonkey could prefer peering with other users on the same ISP.
Re:Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
by wmf on Thursday March 08, 2012 @12:11PM
(#3680554)
Upstream bandwidth on DOCSIS causes congestion that requires capex (node splits) to fix, so it's definitely not free. See http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/74/slides/alto-1.pdf
Re:Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
by kijin on Thursday March 08, 2012 @12:03PM
(#3680516)
That would certainly help, but there's a limit to same-ISP peering. For example, I use a relatively small ISP, so not many people are going to be using the same ISP that I do. Even if you use a larger ISP, you're screwed if even a single person dumps 100GB/mo of data on your SpaceMonkey drive.
Re:Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
by divtxt on Thursday March 08, 2012 @10:47AM
(#3680100)
Yes, bandwidth is a concern, but it should be easy to let users choose bandwidth limits. The question then is whether the product is still useful if it takes 10/20/30 months to fill the hard drive. I suspect that there's a segment of the population for which it will.
Re:Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
by kokey on Thursday March 08, 2012 @12:41PM
(#3680709)
It's funny, it's just as the world started to become more sane again by storing data centrally now we have a company that will bring us back to storing things locally and share it out on links that at the last mile are not implemented to be full duplex. The economics of this is just wrong, and hopefully it won't take off.
Re:Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
by andrewgodwin on Thursday March 08, 2012 @10:26AM
(#3680021)
Not to mention the obvious legal ramifications, even of encrypted data - in the UK, it's a crime not to give up the key to encrypted data, even if you claim to not have it (though I would hope in this case it's provable you really never did, and that would somehow help.)