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Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

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throw0101a·

Not so funny at times: an article from 2009, "In Africa, A Pigeon Transfers Data Faster Than The Internet":

* https://www.wired.com/2009/09/in-africa-a-pigeon-transfers-d...

* https://spectrum.ieee.org/carrier-pigeon-beats-internet-

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A truck full of storage volumes can have a higher bandwidth than fiber. Just really bad latency.

Interesting how the analogy progressed over the years from "a station wagon filled with tapes" to "a truck full of storage volumes".

An A380 filled with micro SD cards would likely beat any conceivable fiber network in bandwidth, if not latency.

XKCD What If kinda answered your question, although it's for the real fleets and not a specific plane, https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/. From February 2013 though, so out-of-date even if you ignore how covid has messed with shipping.

A hyperloop full of DNA-based storage has more bandwidth than STM-1024 but less latency.

This is roughly the idea behind Amazon snowball and similar products.

Strap the pigeon with 100 1TB microSD cards (~250 mg per card) and the bandwidth will approach the transfer speed of the microSD card itself — nearly gigabit speed for UHS-III cards.

It will be able to approach even faster than that, just have multiple card readers at both ends.

As long as your name isn't google, transfer by pigeon will always be faster (regardless of africa, silicon valley or downtown New York). The reason people use the internet for data transfer has little to do with transfer speed and everything to do with latency.

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