"rival clouds are trying to overcome the problem of cloud seeding in different ways."
Disingenuous or just ignorant?
You still can't beat the bandwidth of a truck filled with disks, which Amazon acknowledges. AWS too provides an import/export service using portable media: "Disk is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity."
A gratuitous bash at the NBN (which deserves bashing). This is just Microsoft ticking a box in its copy-AWS-features list.