I agree that the data connections need to be there but I suspect that it’s only a question of time. 100Mbps should be enough and I suspect that we’ll see that in the next decade or so.

The worry, on my end, is actually that this will become more of the norm. The net-net of such a norm is that end-users will no longer have full control over their bits as those bits will now be stored on some corporate server somewhere.

At that point, our bits will be regulated under potentially onerous terms of services that could lead to those corporations owning more of the content than we do.

The bottleneck here is the carriers. Good luck talking sense to them. Right now those serving homes are all slathering over the move of TV to IP, because they can get to intermediate the charge-for-content game that cable TV has been for decades, but on a more granular à la carte basis. Meanwhile the mobile carriers would rather limit data use and enjoy the benefits of “bill shock” to compliant 3G customers who make the mistake of using data connections while “roaming” across national borders.

In fact, the carriers can benefit from the cloud enormously, but locating local storage beside fat backbone, conditioned power and free real estate at cable head ends and telco central offices, and offer services either on their own branded basis or white labeled from Amazon, Google and Rackspace.

But, again, good luck getting anywhere with them on it. They’ll keep pushing ‘triple play” until they realize they’ve struck out.

IMHO on a Friday afternoon, anyway.