Today’s the day Jeff Geerling makes it to the Washington Post for a decent story about carrier pigeons vs. Ethernet. Very fun to see as both a homelabber and newspaper person.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
Initial assumption that it’s faster to sneakernet couple hundred GB’s is a bit dated (as are other measurements, you can fit a lot more data in a milk jug on sd cards today), but theory remains the same.
The boxes of papers on an airplane seat in The Post come to mind. I’ve also seen encrypted hard drives being mailed to contractors with keys sent out-of-band afterwards.
There are a lot of good reasons to carry data around.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At certain data volumes and distances, the pigeon is a quicker option for large swaths of rural America, where internet speeds can lag far behind the national average.
Rural-urban and rich-poor divides in internet quality persist because of uneven investment, according to Alex Kelley, head of broadband consulting at the Center on Rural Innovation.
The daily inefficiencies that come with slower internet can add up to lagging economic growth or increased unemployment as reliance on the digital economy grows, Kelley says.
Earlier this year, YouTuber and software developer Jeff Geerling strapped 3 terabytes’ worth of flash drives onto a pigeon.
(He made sure to wrap them in a plastic bag: “If the bird poops, you don’t want to lose your data.”) The pigeon won against his super-fast gigabit fiber internet.
In 2016, Amazon launched AWS Snowmobile, a shipping container that can hold up to 100 petabytes of data — that’s 20 billion iPhone photos.
The original article contains 902 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This post is two-weeks old and nobody posted the IPoAC packet loss pic? I am disappoint.
