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."

Comments

The question is...

[UncHellMatt]

...African or European?

Re:Bandwidth?

[gclef]

No, but they were allowed to assume a spherical truck.

HP's CPIP in the 80's

[woboyle]

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... :-)

They're not that bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a customer for years, and I haven't noticed any problems. (Oh, and first post BTW.)

Re:Bandwidth?

[Twylite]

Not relevant. The truck wins.

Let's make some conservative assumptions:

• The distance from New York to San Francisco is 3,000 miles (Google Maps says 2,905).
• The truck can only manage an average of 18 mph.
• The truck driver is unionized and will only drive for 8 hours a day (he'll drive weekends for overtime pay though).
• Loading takes a day (8 hours) and the truck leaves the following morning; unloading takes a day. If the truck is over half-full we will add an additional day each for loading and unloading, just to be sure.
• Each hard drive is 40 GiB and individually packaged in protective foam, totalling 30cm x 20cm x 6cm in size.
• All rounding and all interpretation of SI prefixes favours the T1.
• After unloading the HDDs must be manually plugged in (1 hour overhead per drive) and transferred at 10MB/sec.

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.