Why Lit San Leandro synchronous bandwidth is the better bandwidth (or why asynchronous is dead)

First, a primer.

Synchronous bandwidth means you have an equal bandwidth in both directions.    A synchronous 10Mbps Internet connection means you have a full 10 Megs upload [to the web] and a full 10 Megs download [from the web].

Asynchronous bandwidth means you have an unequal bandwidth.   Usually, you have a large download speed and a smaller (or just plain small) upload speed.

Traditionally, for both the way a typical end-user would use the bandwidth -and- to economically build out the broadband networks initially, the network providers installed connections with a couple of megabits per second download capacity and only a few hundred kilobits per second in upload capacity. 

Back in the mid-90's, there was very little wrong with providing asynchronous bandwidth as a valued service because back then it met probably a high ninety percentile of the users' (home or business) online bandwidth needs.  

Today in 2012, even a single teenager with a Facebook account can overwhelm the slow upload side of an asynchronous connection, never mind a company, for example, trying to upload a multi-gigabyte 12-minute promotional HD video to their marketing consultant.

Today, asynchronous bandwidth is not-so-slowly failing to meet the needs of the average user, never mind a business, professional office, IT consultancy or graphic artist shop, etc.

A typical ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line) is 6 Megabits download and less than 1 Megabit upload.  Even the download speed isn't that impressive any longer - a BluRay player sends 30Mbps to your HDTV, so we have a long way to go before Amazon Instant Video or NetFlix achieves full uncompressed 1080p with 5.1 sound matching quality.  

And don't take this in strictly an entertainment context. A 1080p video conference system for business requires a couple of 10s of megabits with more than a few users in the session.  And if you are still using long distance phone calls as your main collaboration tool, it is time to come into the 21st century and use the correct, more useful, more customer appealing and cheaper collaboration tool - audio and video conferencing solutions.

But the real issue is the upload speed, for today's usage patterns, it makes very little sense to have such a small upload bandwidth allocation on today's high bandwidth circuits.

Can you imagine sending your 30 page PowerPoint research summary complete with embedded HD video and pictures over less than 1 megabit per second? And you thought uploading a short video clip to Facebook was a chore from a 3G cellphone...

Anything of size (computer aided drawing files, graphical information systems (GIS) maps, database traffic, data replication, offsite backups, HD imaging and movies, etc.) will be more than difficult to send in a reasonable time over the traditional asynchronous connection.  Remember every year the typical file size doubles.     Remember your first 640x480 digital camera and its puny .15MB files?   Now think of the file sizes of your new Canon HD SLR TIFF HD stills at 50MBs each or the 100s of MBs used by your iPhone 4's HD videos.    If you are a professional photographer or cartographer or surveyor, do you want to spend hours sending an image (or mapping/GIS) file over traditional slow upload asynchronous lines?

...or send the file in a few seconds on system like ? 

The answer is very clear - Lit San Leandro is the obvious choice.

In Information Technology, one of many areas I specialize in is large scale backups, including online backups, and disaster recovery of very large data sets (terabyte and petabyte levels).    Please trust me when I inform you that high latency asynchronous bandwidth will not meet this need.    Every business has (or should have) a disaster recovery program.    The days of writing all your data to magnetic tape infinitum and trucking it to a vault somewhere is for the most part over (too slow and too costly, and real security and data integrity problems abound).    That methodology is being replaced with storing your backups offsite by transmitting your data to another site overnight over very fast Internet connections.    Lit San Leandro is perfect for this type of bandwidth activity while the traditional asynchronous lines would most likely never be able to keep up with the offsite backup traffic of any real size.    

Asynchronous bandwidth in this scenario would almost certainly mean a failure in your business' disaster recovery planning and practice.

Using Lit San Leandro to support your business' DR needs could mean the difference in whether or not your business survives a major disaster.

More to follow...

(Sign up to get San Leandro Patch delivered by email.)