One of the hot topics at this year’s CTIA Wireless show is the potential for “cloud computing” for mobile devices. If you don’t know exactly what cloud computing is, you are in good company. Ask some number of computer professionals for a definition and you are likely to get at least that many different replies. But the gist of cloud computing is that processing, applications and storage tend to move away from the user and onto servers located somewhere in “the cloud,” which is a metaphor for the Internet. (In “big picture” diagrams of the data communications universe, the Internet is usually depicted as an amorphous cloud.)
As a simple example of how cloud computing could work, suppose you are writing a document on your PC using a common word processing application like Microsoft Word. The Word app software resides on your PC, and your commands, through the keyboard and mouse, trigger the app to input and edit the text as you require. The Word file you create is then stored on the PC’s hard drive where you can access it when needed. Note that none of these processes require Internet access – the PC does it all.
Now imagine that the Word app isn’t on your PC. Instead, it resides on a server somewhere in cyberspace which you access through the Internet. You enter and edit text the same way you did before, but the actual processing is done on that server, which constantly updates your PC screen to reflect what you’ve done. When it comes time to save your file, it is stored on the server, not your PC. That’s cloud computing, and taken to the ultimate extreme, the PC becomes not much more than a user interface device with an “operating system” that is basically just a Web browser.
On the surface, this sounds like a great idea for the mobile data environment. To an extent, it’s the basis of “netbook” computers, which generally require Internet connectivity to provide much utility. But a number of new companies want to take the idea of mobile cloud computing much farther. For example, the Taiwanese software platform development company Ubitus offers several cloud-based services, including interactive gaming. Gaming would seem to be an ideal application to move to the cloud because it requires high processor speeds, something that handheld devices like smartphones typically lack.
Smartphones also lack vast memory resources, so having an array of general purpose applications, and scads of user files, is often impractical. All the more reason to embrace cloud computing for mobile devices, which helps explain why a number of exhibitors besides Ubitus are showing their cloud-based products in the exhibition hall.
Unfortunately, and please excuse the pun, the future of cloud computing in the mobile world may be pretty dark and foreboding. The biggest problem isn’t reliance on an Internet connection – ubiquitous broadband networks should pretty much deal with that. What will likely make mobile cloud computing a challenge in the long run is bandwidth scarcity. Pushing the processing and storage into the network generally means far higher throughput requirements for mobile networks that are already being strained in many urban areas.
The higher speeds provided by 4G technologies won’t offer much help, either, because the problem isn’t so much instantaneous speeds on wireless networks as it is throughput capacity. That can only be expanded by network optimization, which has its limits, and adding more radio spectrum, which is even more difficult.
So, while I wish Ubitus and all the other mobile cloud computing companies the best of luck, my guess is that ultimately the winners will be companies that take mobile computing in exactly the opposite direction. That is, by developing devices and applications (which will reside in those devices) that treat wireless data bandwidth as the precious resource that it is.
Drucker is president of Drucker Associates. He may be contacted at edrucker@drucker-associates.com.