Sneakernet, Pigeonet And The Meaninglessness Of Judging Broadband By Silly Stunts
from the so-what? dept
A bunch of folks have been sending in this story about how a carrier pigeon beat a broadband line in transferring 4 gigs of data between two offices 60 miles apart. The problem with such stunts is that they're rather meaningless. All you need to do is pick a storage size for the pigeon that is sufficiently large. The speed of the broadband connection is known in advance, and so you can just pick a file size that is significantly larger. Given the right sizes, I'd imagine that flying across the Atlantic with hard drives full of data is probably faster than some trans-Atlantic fiber cables as well. It doesn't mean that the cable is necessarily slow. The point is that for some things a "sneakernet" or (in this case) "pigeon net" will be faster. It does sound like the DSL connection being used was, in fact, slow, but that can be demonstrated just as easily by, I don't know, noting the actual bandwidth of the connection. I guess, as a publicity stunt, it draws attention, but I can't see how it's really that meaningful.
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Replacement for Magic Jack?
Seriously, the Smoke Signals will work better. Plus it gives you an excuse to get a little rain-dance action going.
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Meaningless is an adjective. It doesn't really make sense to say "The clever of judging silly stunts".
Meaninglessness is the noun.
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Re:
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Humor
Who's seriously suggesting otherwise? It's called humor, Mike. Some people have a sense for it, some don't.
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Re: Humor
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O RLY?
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Re: O RLY?
Carrier pigeons: winged messengers of the dead!
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To quote wiki "However by placing their food at one location and their home at another location, pigeons have been trained to fly back and forth up to twice a day reliably. This setup allows Pigeons to cover 160km round trip". So pegeons aren't a bad delivery method. 1mbit shdsl will output about 360mb an hour, which is give or take 8.6gb a day. So the equivalent of 2 pigeon trips. Their test didn't allow for return time or maximum trips.
And yes more than anything its a stunt. Its fluff designed to get picked up by a newspaper. The real story if any is about some fibre optic cables being run.
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To quote wiki "However by placing their food at one location and their home at another location, pigeons have been trained to fly back and forth up to twice a day reliably. This setup allows Pigeons to cover 160km round trip". So pegeons aren't a bad delivery method. 1mbit shdsl will output about 360mb an hour, which is give or take 8.6gb a day. So the equivalent of 2 pigeon trips. Their test didn't allow for return time or maximum trips.
And yes more than anything its a stunt. Its fluff designed to get picked up by a newspaper. The real story if any is about some fibre optic cables being run.
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Stupid is...
Now, I don't know about you guys, but six miles, without a car is quite a distance, so a pigeon, carrying what is basically a DVDs worth of info, (so, a film with crappy commentaries and maybe a few deleted scenes that the director filmed specifically for the DVD), got to point B faster by something that supposedly evolved from a dinosaur, which is like, really really old, than it did by superfast modern tech broadband...
Which proves quite satisfactorily to me that broadband is indeed throttled to near death, and broadband companies are fricking ripping us off.
Tony P.
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Re: Stupid is...
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Burn Time
In this case it probably wouldn't have mattered. But it does mean that there is no sufficiently large storage medium to make trans-Atlantic pidgeon-net faster than the 10Gbps fibre links.
-Perros-
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Re: Burn Time
Huh? Sure there is. A parallel drive array could easily do it.
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An array of pigeons.
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Re: Burn Time
This test is completely meaningless and is just fluff to get the news out there, but it's good fluff. Plus this test could have been done with 500M of data or 32G depending on the card strapped to the pigeon.
Haven't you all heard about how Google transfers large amounts of it's data? They put it on HDDs and FedEx it.
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Of course, it's not really clear why the speed matters if it's not going directly to be processed in some way or another.
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And what about torrents? I mean, what is the storage to wing-span ratio of a migrating swallow?
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Re: Burn Time
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A dastardly plan!
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You could strap one of those to a Pigeon pretty easy I'd reckon! And what if they trained an Albatross to carry stuff? They could probably fly an entire server cross continent!
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The *real* reason for the stunt
All broadband ISPs in the country need to travel along Telkom's backbone, and pay whatever they Telkom for. These costs are passed over to the consumer, like it or leave it.
The only ISPs that don't use the backbone are those involved with wireless (your lowest package is 50MB cap a month, no jokes).
To give it context: your BASIC broadband package is a 1GB international cap 385kbs which you'll pay R400/m for (incl line rental). For a 4GB cap (1-4MB line), you pretty much need to be to rich or be a business.
Don't take my word for it; look in for yourselves what we pay for broadband.
This stunt isnt about speed or taking HDDs by plane, its about creating awareness of business struggling against a single broadband monopoly while the rest of the world is working with municipal wifi, public networks and complain when they're capped.
There is no broadband competition here against Telkom.
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Re: The *real* reason for the stunt
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Does it beat a
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Re: Does it beat a
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. pp. 83. ISBN 0-13-349945-6.
although:
The original version of this quotation came much earlier; the very first problem in Tanenbaum's 1981 textbook Computer Networks asks the student to calculate the throughput of a St. Bernard carrying floppy disks (which are said to hold 250 kilobytes of data).
So I can see the confusion.
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Re: Re: Does it beat a
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Meaningful?
This could catch on - we'd need a new storage stat though to go along with the present lot - grams/Mb.
The white hat in me feels compelled to point out that in testing however Pidgeon1.0 is vulnerable to a denial of service attack from Kestral2.5 - you might want to include some packet encrytion and some sort of host intrusion prevention on your network, possibly Shotgun2008.
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IPoAC
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Pigeon mail
I was also pleased to see that Telkom do have an occasional sense of humor, hidden though it may be.
The last paragraph of their statement (courtesy mybroadband.co.za) reads:
"Finally, it has not escaped Telkom’s attention that this entire episode has generated much excitement and interest, but the Company emphatically denies that we are currently considering placing this means of data transfer in our product catalogue and wholesaling it. However, Telkom is glad that, finally, we are able to welcome “real” competition in the telecommunications industry and, as a Company, we are confident that the above-mentioned points of clarification will certainly set the cat among the pigeons."
BTW, the use pigeons is of course not new: see RFC1149 [using CPIP] for details
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Useful?
Useful to raise attention, and even give people a good chuckle? Yes.
Value obtained.
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Pigeonet
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yeah, but what about latency?
i have been seeding a DVD ISOs of wikipedia on bittorrent for people in places like africa to hand carry to remote villages.
the problem with sneakernets is latency. being able to move gigs fast is only one part of the equation. the amount of time it takes to do something with those gigs and respond is also an issue. if your data is lost/damaged in transit, it might take while to determine that and request a retransmit.
speaking of sneakernets, i have had great success trading 1TB usb hard drives with friends. that's pretty much the best way to move huge amounts of stuff, rips of several DVD boxsets.
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Re: yeah, but what about latency?
Bandwidth =/= latency.
Despite being slow, there are significant advantages to an always-on connection that handles a small amount of data constantly.
If you had the choice between connecting up to your city's water system, or instead building a water tank and having a truck come by to fill it once a month, which would you choose?
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Faster than the U.S.
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one word
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Re: one word
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Now, IDK if this was a advertisement stunt, but that also is irrelevant, this will cause people to switch. It would be the same with any other product, in which exact circumstances being met caused undesirable problems of mass proportion, despite how stupid that test may seem to those in the know. The end result being that those not in the know shy away from that product, failing to realize the unlikelihood or the fact that "they're rather meaningless."
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You're just jealous
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You need "meaning" in everything?
Just enjoy it for what it is--a good chuckle.
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That was so slow
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