In response to a strong demand for their services here in Australia and New Zealand, Dropbox has today announced that they’ve deployed a ‘Point-of-Presence’ (‘PoP’) in Sydney to improve upload and download speeds for local customers.
The deployment of a PoP in Australia will effectively act as a proxy server for Dropbox allowing local personal and business accounts get faster access to their files, documents and Dropbox services. Access to the local PoP will be rolled out to local customers over the next two months says Dropbox, with the plan to make it a seamless transition.
The demand for service locally, both here and around the world has seen Dropbox working on local PoP deployments around the world. Last year in November, the company announced the deployment of PoPs in Europe, Asia, and parts of the US to cope with increased demand. This deployment, the company said has ‘doubled the transfer speeds
Dropbox has seen a massive demand for their services here in Australia with the company announcing that 44% of business listed in the the ASX 200 have a Dropbox Business account, an increase from 34% last year, while 99% of ASX200 companies have a Dropbox footprint of some kind. Dropbox also said that the largest demand for their collaborative document editing service ‘Paper’ here in Australia, has been ‘amongst the highest in A/NZ than anywhere in the world’.
Daniel Iversen, Dropbox’s head of solutions architecture APAC says that the shift in growth towards collaborative file sharing shows the importance of collaboration in this part of the world saying
In a small and isolated market like A/NZ, global collaboration is becoming the secret sauce in driving innovation and competitive differentiation. Our data shows that Dropbox is being used by A/NZ companies to increase their innovation capacity.
If you’re a Dropbox user you’ll be finding your speeds increasing over the coming months, making it a neat, and fast alternative to other services such as Google Drive. You can find the Dropbox and Dropbox Paper apps available on Google Play.
This is great in theory but our biggest problem is not their ability to deal with our data it is the slow local internet speed that means you can only upload files at ~70Kbps. Until the NBN is rolled out here it is going to be just as slow as it always has been and currently I am going to have to wait another 2 years unless they push out the date again. On top of that many ISP’s are not paying enough to carry the data their customers are wanting to use often leading to congestion too.