When Movies Fly: How Modern Internet Experience Is Made Possible by Airplanes
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As a way of seeding the contents of a new CDN node when it's built, I can believe this. As a way of continuously synchronising an existing node, I have more trouble believing it.
– Andrew Tanenbaum
My own CS professor used to use a similar analogy of a donkey carrying hard drives on his way to New Zealand. I think most us probably had a CS professor that used similar analogies, as it quickly distinguishes between latency and bandwidth.
I have a co-worker whose father worked in the Bay area during the 70's and 80's. Back then computer time was expensive and not many places could afford to install high quality hardware (basically the 70's mainframe is the 2010's data center - there are relatively few). So people who wanted work done would have to ship their tapes over to the computer and have their job run. My friend's father was one of these couriers who would run the tapes around in the back of his station wagon.
So that night they had Grandma sit outside the lab in her car. As soon as their first run was done, they ran the punch cards with the results out to her. She drove across the city and started the computer run while they reset the experiment. As soon as the run finished, she drove the new cards back to them.
They ran their second experiment, got their results, and got the best grade in their class.
The way Grandma tells it is that she was driving 90mph across the city in her brother's Corvette at 3am. I'm not sure how true that part is...
Our plan? He went to Best Buy, got a USB hard drive & mailed it to me. I loaded it up with footage and mailed it back to him. Once he got it, I think he was even able to return the hard drive and get his money back. The only expense was postage, and we saved a lot of time.
TIL pigeons can average 60MPH for 75 minutes: https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%28%28120%2F1.6%29%2F...
There's a standalone command line client too [2], but it requires a bit more knowledge of how to tweak the settings, while Aspera and the Globus client does a lot of auto ranging stuff.
In any case, both of them will easily get you line speed from your slowest node.
[2]: http://toolkit.globus.org/toolkit/data/gridftp/quickstart.ht...
Network connectivity between Earth and Mars is going to be a slow affair, though, and will require relay satellites for when the Sun is between the planets.
A worst case round trip time of 45 minutes definitely won't be fun with TCP.
Will interstellar communication really be almost as difficult as interstellar travel?
The engineering problem is already solved for probe communications anyway.
So I think there will be massive caches on both sides. Accessing any popular content will be pretty fast because it will already be cached. Live data will be delayed by up to half an hour depending on orbital position, but that's not terrible. Conversations would be the worst, with up to an hour delay round-trip.
Past Mars it would get harder. You'd need much more power to keep the bandwidth up, and the latency would get worse.
But it's still quicker to put a box of HDs on a plane from Miami to New Zealand than to wait until the data has propagated.
Planes stacked full of HDDs have a lot of bandwidth.