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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

Great concept if applied to other products. For example it's quite common to travel to countries with low labour costs to save on dental work.

Earlier this year I did “upload tourism”, travelling from Australia (where uploads are painfully slow) to Thailand where they were 50x faster. Got my 2Tb done in 3 days where it would have taken half a year back home. Easily justified the cost of the plane ticket and accommodation.

In fact, it saved money: telstra 7 x 300gb plans ≈ $2100 Vs flight ($350) + accommodation ($500) + incidentals = ~$1000.

~$1k saving and free holiday

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> Earlier this year I did “upload tourism”, travelling from Australia (where uploads are painfully slow) to Thailand where they were 50x faster. Got my 2Tb done in 3 days where it would have taken half a year back home. Easily justified the cost of the plane ticket and accommodation.

So basically, never underestimate the bandwidth of an airplane filled with SSDs?

Seriously though, I get that uploads to The Cloud can be slow from Australia, but do you guys not have any sort of unlimited data plans?!

Data limit doesn't seem to be the main bottleneck: "Got my 2Tb done in 3 days where it would have taken half a year back home." (emphasis mine)

Back in he day <wavey lines> I did 3 annual round the world trips from Sydney with 6 80GB hard drives in my carryon luggage - to replace the Raid1 arrays in our colo-ed web servers in London, Dallas, and Palo Alto. We only had 56kbps of bandwidth back then - it would have taken a couple of weeks of saturating out internet connection to upload one of those 80GB drives to the prod servers.

Using a Starlink dish would propably have been cheaper?

Upload speeds are not as good as download but 2 terabytes should be uploaded in 2 weeks and 4 days with Starlink 10Mbps.

If you want to be very cheap you could do this in your 30 day trial period and return the dish afterwards but I'm assuming you have similiar upload needs often so keeping the dish is propably better.

Test comment please ignore

Finding someone at a university, office or maybe library seems like an easier and more environmentally friendly option.

The problem with this is guarding the laptop during the days/weeks (e.g. if you leave your laptop in a university library, even just momentarily for a bathroom break, it could go walking). There’s also the cost/hassle of enrolment (or sharing an existing student’s login).

I was more thinking of asking a friend to upload it on some gigabit connection. Not days then.

Why TF is data upload so slow in a top tier country like Australia?!?

Former government sabotaged it by making national build-out with a random mix of technologies focusing on copper instead of fibre.

newish country, spread out population, undersea cables, plus Telstra + Murdoch getting the government to gut plans to improve things (e.g. the NBN).

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