Broadband Developments

I love how the bandwagon of cloud computing it hitting on all time high. Everyone is about the cloud. Today AT&T announced it is joining the Cloud Bandwangon. AT&T said Tuesday that it will offer cloud computing services via a new service dubbed AT&T Synaptic Hosting. AT&T is just the latest company to join the cloud computing game. Everyone from traditional IT giants like HP and IBM to Amazon and Google have cloud computing services catering to companies ranging from enterprise giants to startups.

The category of the “Cloud” is the new branding or categorically sector for all the big infrastructure players. Cloud computing is the new category that we’ll all keep score on who is the best vendor.

Why is cloud computing such a hit for these companies? It’s because it spans multiple sectors - enterprise datacenter, web services, consumer, virtualization, security. It’s sort of a convergence between intranets, DMZ, extranet, and outside web all in one.

It’s a land grab and yet it’s so unknown. It’s a marketing dream for a big vendor to say ‘we own the cloud’.

My take: it can’t be owned. Lock-in is harder in today climate. Old lock in tactics don’t work in today’s infrastructure.

What are the new lock-in tactics? We’ll be covering them. Right now Google, VMWare, and Amazon are putting on a clinic in the cloud area. Everyone else is an also ran.

I saw this on CNNMoney today. AT&T is asking federal regulators to provide a stricter review of Sprint’s acquisition of Clearwire.

Sprint and Clearwire announced their intention to merge last month, saying the venture would facilitate a national wireless Internet network that would operate on a block of airwaves partly reserved for schools, cities and other nonprofits.

Indeed, late last year AT&T sold Clearwire the rights to some of the spectrum Clearwire will use for its WiMAX network. The issue for AT&T is fairness. When it acquired Dobson Communications last year, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) evaluation considered airwaves that AT&T bought rights to, but which won’t be available until next February.

AT&T charges that when it comes to evaluating the Sprint-Clearwire deal, the FCC and other regulatory bodies are not considering airwaves Clearwire has yet to access.

Ok complete bullshit. We need more broadband in this country for rural, urban, and schools both wired and wireless.

This is a competitive issue for our country. AT&T needs to stop this behavior now.