How fast is your internet?

In the increasingly 1:1 environments of our schools there has been a whole sale adoption of cloud based storage. While this presents a plethora of opportunities for security, safety and collaboration, it also has a few downsides.

Currently in Australia, if you live in a town like I do, the NBN is a distant dream. While I achieve slight-better-than-the-rest speed of 11Mbps, the national average is 6.9Mbps. What is worse, is that this figure is based on combined metropolitan and rural/regional data. Why is it worse? Is because the NBN (fixed line) and 4G (wireless) density in urban areas is significantly higher. Many students in our diocese are unable to get any kind of service that would qualify as broadband.

Late in 2009, an IT company in South Africa sought to point out the sorry state of affairs, It loaded up a carrier pigeon with 4GB of data and flew it 60 miles to its destination. In the same time that it took the bird to complete the journey, only a quarter of the data had arrived via the internet.

To put this in perspective, At the current 6.9Mbps that Australia 'enjoys', that same carrier pigeon would be neck and neck with the same 4GB at 60 miles.

Yet this isn't 2009.

And SD cards are no longer 4GB or even 128GB. They are 512GB!

What does this mean for the carrier pigeon flying 60 miles? The humble carrier pigeon has a transfer speed of over 800Mbps! That's well over 100 times the speed of our current internet.

Or better still, if you had 512GB of data to transfer, you could either use broadband to transfer it taking 6 ½ days or you could get the card, pop it into the new Australia post two-days-later-40%-more-expensive letter delivery service and still shave days off the trip.

Ok, all of this is just funny analogies. However...

This is the reality - long or short term - in Australia. Our average internet speed is 44th in the world, about where Thailand is. Even our cross-Tasman cousins enjoy better speed. What's worse is its slipping rather than gaining.

If you are expecting your students in your 1:1 device program to be able to be effective learners using digital tools and online storage and workflows, will the internet that they have be able to cope?

Equally, what structures and process will you have in place for students unable to access the internet or unable to access it in a suitable fashion?

And just in case you were wondering, if you were attempting to send that same 512GB data file(s) from Sydney to Melbourne, the carrier pigeon would complete the task in a touch over 10 hours. This is 108MBps, or 8 more than our current fastest NBN broadband.

Side note: The reason for this widening gap isn't bad policy. The bulk of the different is that internet speeds have not increased at the same rate as storage capacity. Storage capacity has been roughly working at Moore's law (doubles every 18 months) while internet speed is far more incremental.