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Pigeons' Bandwidth Advantage Quantified
An anonymous reader submits "A well documented test took
place in the north of Israel, in presence of several dozen Internet geeks and
experts. During the test, 3 homing pigeons carried 4 GB (gigabytes) for 100 km
distance, achieving, what apparently looks as pigeons' world record in data
transfer to a given distance. Bandwidth achieved by the pigeons was 2.27
Mbps...Transferring a similar volume of information through a common uplink of
ADSL line would have taken no less than 96 hours..."
...African, or European?
pong **** CARRIER LOST
Don't you mean CARRIER PIGEON LOST?
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Was it african or european?
I disagree. Bandwidth is the amount of data delivered/time it takes to deliver.
If the pigeons fly twice as fast, they can deliver twice as much data in the same time period. Thus the bandwidth doubles.
If the distance were to double then it would take at least twice as long to deliver the same amount of data. Thus the bandwidth would halve.
You would be correct, using the term bandwidth loosely, if the number of pigeons stayed constant. However, using the strict definition, bandwidth is totally unrelated to line latency/round trip time.
So, basically, what you are saying is "If you define 'bandwidth' according to a strict and unusual definition that nobody actually uses in real life, I'm precisely correct."
I don't care what your book or professor said bandwidth is defined as. In real life people define the word "bandwidth" to mean "the amount of data that can be transmitted per unit of time". Until now, I have never heard it used to mean anything else.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
You're both idiots for arguing such a stupid concept of birds carrying data.
Bandwidth is the theoretical maximum data rate of a network link.
In real data networking, the throughput is very much related to the latency. The throughput of your pipe is effectively the "switching speed", which determines the latency (disregarding propogation latency, which is much less than bandwidth latency in most cases). In stupid-fucking-bird-networking, latency is primarily determined by the distance & speed of the birds, since they are quite a bit slower than the speed of light.
What "egomaniac" is referring to is throughput, not bandwidth. Throughput obviously does depend on latency, and efficiency of the protocol.