The Internet Under Your Desk

Will emerging modem technologies turn our homes into mini-data-centres, serving up internet data to the world?

New Scientist reports that Spanish Telecoms giants Telefonica has teamed up with the Georgia Institute of Technology and modem manufacturer Thomson to work on the ‘Nano Data’ project, which aims to redistribute much of the data currently stored in large data-centres around the world into the spare capacity in household modems.

In this way, when one of your neighbours looks up a popular internet site, instead of the request being routed to the originating data-centre somewhere across the globe, it could instead be routed to a copy of that data stored in the modem under your desk.

The project’s key objective is to drive down the energy consumption associated with ‘always-on’ data-centres by hosting data in much smaller chunks on the modems in people’s homes.  Homes which do not, of course, need cooling.

So whilst this is an interesting and, from a green perspective, worthy initiative, it is also one which raises some interesting questions regarding the nature of the content which might be accessed by third parties from the modem in your home.