ON OMNIDRIVE AND EVOLVING ONLINE STORAGE MODELS

LIVIN' LARGE ONLINE

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington speaks enthusiastically this morning about Omnidrive yet another player that's emerging out of the "pre-beta" stage, in the online storage space.  This is an area where I've had great expectations in for some time now. 

As I put it back this August:

"To borrow from Wired Magazine:

TIRED:  Storing all Your Stuff on Individual PCs/laptops/PDAs/Phones and syncing 'em.
WIRED: Storing all you Stuff online with infinite storage, access, security, and share-ability...for free or near free."

But today's services still have to be mindful of the broadband economics as they stand today.  In a post this April, I outlined some of the limitations:

"...we've got a long way to go in sending digital data to other people; the bottlenecks include:

1.  upload limits put on by broadband providers,
2.  attachment limits put on by email providers,
3.  storage limits and charges by online hosting services,
4.  the limits of some of the prevalently used software, and
5.  the latencies driven by multi-node nature of the Internet itself.

...although the world has come a long way from dial-up, we still have a long way to go on broadband deployment. 

Today's speeds already feel like dial-up speeds did a decade ago, when it comes to uploading and sharing large files.   Xdrive, a provider of online storage and backup services, has a good explanation on the limits of uploading in today's broadband environment. 

This then makes you feel a little bit better rationalizing how much you'll have to pay for their services...to be fair, their prices though high, are representative of the industry at the current time."

Well, it's been over six months since then, and the economics get better with time. Om Malik had a post a few days ago that outlines what's possible at today's broadband speeds, including the informative table shown here (click image for larger picture).

Unfortunately, it's not all JUST about riding the "Broadband Wave".  There are regulatory speed bumps to contend with both on the wire-line and wireless fronts.  Again, from the April post:

"...making regulatory changes, especially curtailing or dissolving federal programs and entities like the FCC are more likely to happen when hell freezes over, or more likely, when technology and consumer forces make it massively, politically  obvious that the need for spectrum allocation has come and gone."

Our regulatory regimes may result in our seeing the more interesting companies testing the online storage models being outside the US.  It may even have something to do with the aforementioned Omnidrive being an Australian-based start-up.

Regardless, new companies like Omnidrive will have plenty of opportunities to thrill us with the coming convenience of "luxury online living" in the times ahead.

Comments

[michele]

Another beta version back up softwere is italian and called MEMOPAL (www.memopal.com): 250GB space storage, access from everywhere, unlimited pc access, sharing files.