I just read about Googles plan for online storage here. But the question is, how useful would this be?

Don’t get me wrong, Google has some great services such as Gmail and Google Docs. But the problem with the GDrive is nothing Google can control: Download/Upload Speeds.

With time bandwidth speeds have been getting a lot better. But I don’t think we are close to being able to have a majority of our storage online. Imagine going back to the days of slow read/write speeds on a CD drive. That is what would happen if we moved to a model like this. Imagine trying to upload all your images, movies, docs, and backup info. Now most in the US are lucky to have an upstream of 1mbps. At that rate for every 24hrs of uploading you would be able to upload almost 9GB of data. Now if you want to upload your 250GB drive of data to start syncing to, it would take 28 days of non stop uploading just to get setup.

Now maybe I am being a little bit pessimistic, but I feel unless our speeds can increase by at least ten times this will not be viable.

Tell me what you think.