Experience with Steelhead Mobile Across Asia - Part 2
In my work for Riverbed I lead an interesting life, traipsing across the Asia-Pacific region and Evangelizing about the wonders and benefits of WAN Acceleration.
Call it what you will – Application Acceleration, WAN Optimization, Wide-Area File Services (WAFS), Wide-Area Data Services (WDS), etc – many terms exist to describe the functionality and benefits that appliances like the Steelhead product line from Riverbed Technology bring to organizations around the world.
Riverbed however is unique in the industry in offering a truly mature, stable, fully-functional product for mobile user acceleration, with the Steelhead Mobile PC client Acceleration software.
During the course of my travels, I've found myself presented with an incredibly wide variety of network connectivity situations - each presenting their own challenges. Some of these have been truly startling, so I thought I'd share a few anecdotes with you and relate how having Steelhead Mobile on my PC has saved me time and money in an obvious and demonstrable way.
For example, recently I was in sunny 
I was staying at a modern business hotel in the central business district on
Collins Street. The hotel itself was lovely, and reasonably priced. Howerver - I was shocked to see that the hotel’s broadband internet access service had a daily usage limit of 100 Megabytes !!!
According to the terms of the service, the hotel charged one Australian Dollar for each Megabyte over 100M that a guest used on the service – meaning if I used a mere 300M worth of data I could double the cost of my room !
Luckily for me I had my trusty Steelhead Mobile client. It was able to eliminate the transmission of redundant data, so instead of approximately 350Mbytes of real traffic, I was able to come in under the 100Mbyte limit and save myself a massive cost blowout - and a run in with Riverbed’s corporate Finance department.
Interesting point to note – I hear in Sam Diaz’s “Watching the WAN: Is it time to invest?” blog that American Service Providers like Comcast are looking at implementing this kind of per-user monthly bandwidth limit. Doing so could well have a significant financial impact to end users of these services, which would certainly drive the adoption of end-user based optimization technology like Steelhead Mobile.
Comments