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SA's Largest Telecomms Provider vs. a Pigeon
dagwud writes "Just a few days after this Slashdot article, South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service), is being pitted against a homing pigeon to see which can deliver 4GB of call centre data logs quickest over a distance of around 80km (50 miles). According to the official website, the race is set to take place September 10."
...African or European?
I wonder if they will be using an RFC compliant pigeon... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of pigoens hurtling down the highway.
the order for a large shipment of Ospreys, peregrines, and other raptors to South Africa.......
South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service)
It should be mentioned that they have a monopoly on landlines and that's why they're still the largest despite all the flak. 39% state owned, and ICASA(south africa's communications regulator) is practically telkoms bitch.
will they be counting the time it takes to get the data from the computer, put it on the 4gb media, strap it to the bird, send it off, retrieve it, and load it onto the end computer or will they just do a door-to-door race?
RTFA? ME? Do you know what site you're reading?
Knowing Telkom, this is not a fair competition at all. The Pigeon have an unfair advantage of being faster, and not having the 3GB bandwidth cap that is (were 2 years ago) the norm on Telkom's ADSL accounts.
And I know I mentioned the information was 2 years old, but when talking about SA Telcom, that makes the it practically fully up to date
pigeowned.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
The show-down is set for tomorrow (Wed 9 Sep) so we even don't have to wait long for the final results!
They should do it here in the US - dove season just opened in many states. Sure, you'll have a lot of packet loss, but the ones that make it thru will be going really really FAST
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
As someone else mentioned, it would be RAIP, not RAID
RAIP: Redundant Array of Independent Pigeons.
RTFA: they had a trial (pigeon won), got in the news, quickly got a call from the telco's rep to get their circuit number so telco could make sure they had good service. Fair? Well not as long as telco is not giving them more bandwidth than they are supposed to have... in which case telco is just doing their job (which they are obviously not doing now). The best part of the article is the implicit suggestion to switch from ADSL to pigeons: the blogger claims they would save more than 80% cost compared to the existing line, or about USD 4600 per month savings.
The carrier pigeon is not a practical replacement for a high speed link. For one the latency is quite high compared to DSL. Also it may be less secure since it is using a wireless solution.
No, but they were allowed to assume a spherical truck.
In the 70's and 80's, HP in Cupertino used to send engineering drawings (as microfich) to a facility near Santa Cruz, on the other side of the Santa Cruz mountains using carrier pigeons. It was faster and more reliable than using motorcycle courier, and in those days the Darpa-Net wasn't fast enough for the purpose. CPIP - Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol - good bandwidth, not so good latency, though a packet ACK is easily accomplished with a phone call... :-)
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
I've been a customer for years, and I haven't noticed any problems. (Oh, and first post BTW.)
No doubt Telkom will dig up some arcane legislation whereby it is illegal to pit a pigeon against this heavily state-funded telecoms provider. Further, the people organising this will be served legal papers from ICASA ordering them to cease their operations immediately. After many years of lawsuits (and counter-lawsuits) it will be deemed that the organisers do actually have a right to strap USB sticks to pigeons but by that time Telekom will have bred flocks of the creatures thereby preventing any meaningful and productive competition.
Hope the pigeon wins, but this really does gives a new meaning to the expression 'dropped packet'...
Given the fact that this sort of question usually results in two trains colliding, I'd say no. :)
Otherwise, you'd have to add any number of considerations, such as how much of the road was under construction, whether the driver encountered bad chili at a truck stop that necessitated a lot more stops shortly thereafter, and how bumpy the road was (one good solid pothole and you can consider the need for a "resend" request for at least some of the data!)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Don't underestimate the throughput of a wagon full of data tapes speeding down a freeway.
I doubt it. But assuming current technology, the 18 wheeler wins hands down easily. I'll use Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive as my baseline. Looking at it's size and weight, it turns out that the weight is the main limiting factor. Without special permits, a semi-tractor trailer is limited to 80,000 lbs gross weight. Assuming 50,000 lbs is actually usable for cargo, then at 1.371 lbs per drive, the truck can carry 36,500 drives. The volume that many drives is far less than the volume of a 28 ft trailer. So we're talking a single truck load of drives is about 36.5 petabytes.
Now how long would that take to transmit at T1 speeds? 1544000 bits per second = 193,000 bytes per second (yes, I'm ignoring any framing or overhead. Shame on me). Doing the math, I get a transmission time of almost 5993 years.
With that amount of time, I'll assume the truck can travel cross country in 3 days. But to be generous, I'll give it a week. I'll assume assume the handling time for the hard drives is the same at both ends. So in order for the truck to be faster, I have to handle 36,500 hard drives in a total time of less than 2996 years at each end. So I have a budgeted time of only 29.98 days per hard drive at each end.
Somehow, I suspect it would take a lot less time than that.......
Not relevant. The truck wins.
Let's make some conservative assumptions:
Time on the road is 166.667 hours or 20.833 days at 8 hours per day, which we'll round up to 21. Add a day each for loading and unloading and we're at 23 days.
In the same 23 days the T1 is busy for 3600 seconds an hour, 24 hours a day. That's a total of 1987200 seconds at 1.544 Mbps (202375 B/s), or 402159.6 million bytes, or just under 403 Gigabytes.
To beat the T1, the truck needs to carry 11 hard drives. They will fit comfortably on the passanger seat.
Each HDD will take 1.2 hours to download, plus 1 hour overhead for connecting and disconnecting. That's 24.2 hours total but the IT monkey only works 8 hours a day so it's going to take 4 days to transfer onto the servers (damn that 0.2 ...).
During those 4 extra days the T1 is still busy and gets another 69.94 Gigabytes. Looks like we'll actually have to pack _12_ drives into the truck for a total of 480 Gb, beating the T1's 473 Gb over the same period (27 days).
Less conservative assumption: using a 320Gb external USB drive and a motor cycle at 50mph (8 hours per day) you'll make the trip in 8 days, more than doubling the T1's bandwidth.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Yes fried pigeon is quite yummy. Unfortunately since a serious bird flue outbreak a few years ago all over Mainland they tripled in price so we don't eat pigeon so often any more, maybe a few times a year, down from twice a month at least. They haven't come down in price really. You can still get them fresh in the market as well (the vendor will kill and pluck the pigeon for you). I live in Hong Kong, for the record.
Yes fried pigeon is quite yummy. Unfortunately since a serious bird flue outbreak a few years ago all over Mainland they tripled in price so we don't eat pigeon so often any more, maybe a few times a year, down from twice a month at least. They haven't come down in price really. You can still get them fresh in the market as well (the vendor will kill and pluck the pigeon for you). I live in Hong Kong, for the record.
And you have to remember to remove the SD cards from the pigeon before chucking it in the pan.
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