Apple's new iCloud doesn't work everywhere—not really. While the cloud service is supposed to automagically mirror your photos, music, and documents between your various Apple devices, it won't do much of its magic with an iPhone or iPad that's connected to a 3G network. Instead, it will patiently wait for Wi-Fi.
This must really annoy Apple, and it's going to annoy Apple users. But Apple's been down this road before, because there's one big part of its iOS user experience the company can't control: wireless carriers' caps on monthly data usage.
The restrictions on iCloud won't be unique to Apple. As we see mobile cloud services become more popular with big names like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and Google Music, those are also going to run right up against the wireless carriers' new data caps.
Right now, relatively few people exceed their caps, and mobile streaming services have existed for years. But the trend lines are heading in opposite, colliding directions. Caps are getting tighter just as a new generation of high-profile, big-name streaming services are taking off.
On October 1, AT&T will start throttling heavy data users on its old, grandfathered unlimited plans to bring the user experience more in line with its new, capped plans. Sprint's Virgin Mobile brand also tossed away unlimited use; in October, it too will start throttling speeds for people who use more than 2.5GB per month.
How much is 2.5GB? That's about 2,000 5-megapixel photos uploaded via Photo Stream, or about 300 songs synced from iTunes. Not too bad for iCloud. Once you enter the realm of streaming, things get tougher. You'll get 34 hours of Spotify streaming for 2.5GB, or a mere five hours of streaming video at 500kbps bit rate.
I was riffing on 2.5GB there, but different carriers have different caps. Most iPhone plans nowadays are down at 2GB.
Netflix has already knuckled under to home ISP data caps in Canada, reducing its default video quality on big-screen devices so Canadians don't end up being charged hundreds of dollars by their ISPs. And the data caps have crept across the border as well; cable company Comcast imposes a 250GB cap. Still, though, I'd rather have a 250GB cap than a 2.5GB one.
Apple and other cloud providers direct mobile users to Wi-Fi. But here in the U.S., Wi-Fi won't provide a solution. Internet service providers, by and large, successfully torpedoed the idea of municipal Wi-Fi, and their own pay Wi-Fi networks are spotty and unreliable.
Wireless carriers cry poverty. They say they don't have enough spectrum to provide the kinds of Internet services people want, and (in AT&T's case) claim that only eliminating rivals to create gigantic mega-carriers could possibly create an infrastructure to support future traffic.
The carriers have one thing right: we do need more spectrum for wireless Internet services. The government must act quickly to free up spectrum for mobile Internet services. The carriers, on the other hand, have to build out that spectrum more quickly and efficiently than the current 15-year build requirements mandate.
Clearwire, for example, is sitting on a massive quantity of unused spectrum that the company is apparently too broke to build out. Verizon is holding a swathe of 1700Mhz in its pocket for a rainy day. If the spectrum crunch is so desperate that we need to impose successively tighter caps on cloud services, we need to see all of the currently allocated spectrum in use.
I'd also like to see Apple and Google starting to include more data-optimization technologies, like Opera and BlackBerry use to shrink Web pages and other Internet content. Wireless carrier Cricket, in its Muve Music service, is using a new Dolby codec to get decent sound quality on super-small files. That's the kind of thinking we need to see in iCloud and Spotify, at least as an option. If we're in for an era of data scarcity, I'd rather sip data than not be able to use it at all.