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Pigeon Turns Out To Be Faster Than S. African Net
inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."
Suck it, non-pigeons.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
What's the speed of an unloaden African swallow?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
RFC2549 - IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service
A couple of important things were omitted that are important to the pigeon - in particular the time and money that went into training the bird to make that flight. They didn't exactly just reach out of their office window and grab any pigeon that happened to be nearby.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Fine. So your data rate is higher. But the fact is, a carrier pigeon is only half-duplex, whereas your network connection, though slower, is full-duplex. I bet your carrier-pigeon vendor didn't talk about that part, did he?
This give a new meaning to "cloud computing". Just look at the clouds to see the results coming in!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
They forgot to mention that they also got the pigeon to stop and poop all over the Telkom bosses enroute.
that training and money went into creating this network that cannot keep up with a pigeon.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Never underestimate the datarate of a truck loaded with CDs. The latency is a bitch, though.
Seems the same applies to pigeons with flash cards.
The size of the data file is not mentioned nor is the upload speed. Was the pigeon carrying a terabyte of information or 4K? Who knows? Incomplete and useless reporting.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Internet speed is expected to improve once a new 17,000 km underwater fiber optic cable linking southern and East Africa to other networks becomes operational
I thought this "contest" measured the speed of an internal data transfer within SA.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
http://www.bpfh.net/sysadmin/never-underestimate-bandwidth.html
That was Telekom, the government owned telephone and internet semi-monopoly.
They don't have to compete.
40 years ago it was put your name on a list and wait up to five years to get a (wired) phone.
Now it's put your data on the wires and wait for it to get delivered.
But I wonder why I can get to SA web sites and search engines like brabys.co.za and ananzi.co.za fairly quickly.
But they didn't mention how long it took to clean off the pigeon droppings. Eeeewwwwww!!!!
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
For those who don't know about Seacom yet, look here for a quick intro video.
This is however still no silver bullet, as the local Telkom exchanges (where our 4MB lines plug in) can not yet handle higher speeds. Apparently they tested 8MB ADSL earlier and found some issues (I'm too lazy to goole it now...)
Need an ISP in South Africa?
They've been Pigeowned.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
with the size of USB drives you can buy for under $20, I would dare to say that the same experiment would probably have the same results over here in the states (at least with cable and DSL). If I strapped just an 8GB USB drive to a pigeon's leg and had it fly the same distance in around an hour, there's no way my internet connection could beat ~8GB/hr, or approximately 18Mbps (if I calculated correctly).
... when I had to move this RFC to the "useful RFC's" bookmark folder
ISPs hire snipers to defend themselves from homing pigeon carrier competition.
mmmm...forbidden donut
A trained pigeon with a large enough capacity USB stick stuck to it will be faster than the internet in almost any country. It scales great too, just add more pigeons. It's a pipe. The problem is the latency sucks. The post office (or in this case pigeon army) has unlimited bandwidth, but terrible latency. If you want to send some one a few blue rays' worth of data, do you email it? Then your fired. Just put them in the damn post, it will get there much faster.
Tighten the darn string between the tin cans that's all they have to do!
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
But was it African or European? Oops, wrong skit.
It's a nice demo of pigeon power, but did they think about pigeon packet loss ? I'm sure it'll be a little more important than cable packet loss
I didn't found something funny to put here.
Excellent proof of concept by Lord Vetinari. I do hope Moist Von Lipwig gets this contract as well. Increased pigeon poo fertilizer along the main trunk lines should help agriculture in the region as well. Remind me to participate in the subsequent land-snatching.
Newegg lists a 4GB flash drive for $10 (I'm sure you can do better on specials and such). I very much doubt that many people could download 4GB in under an hour, or even two.
How about the time and money spent deplying this piece of crap network??
Besides, I'm sure you can just buy a carrier pigeon nowadays... this is not the 15th century anymore you know...
Am I missing something? Who modded this bigotry informative? And who in that state of mind gets mod points?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Would have made a good premise for a Goodfeathers episode.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Interestingly, the /. quote at the bottom of the page when I was reading this story was:
It's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon. -- Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Back in the day (mid 1970s) when IBM appended "AM" (for Access Method) to all of their protocols, we had BTAM (Basic Telecommunications), TCAM (TeleCommunications), and VTAM (Virtual Telecommunications, which is still around today) to move data. It was widely acknowledged that when it came to raw bandwidth, even over long distances, PTAM (Pickup Truck Access Method) beat them all. You load up a pickup truck with hundreds or thousands of 200MB tapes and drive it across the country.
With 16GB micro SD cards, the statement holds true even today.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
That's nice, but ostriches are far better for that purpose. They are robust, immune to falcon-in-the-middle attacks, does not generate ocassional unexpected drops and can carry much heavier traffic. The only downside is that they require bridges between separated domains.
Anybody else find it funny that the current quote at the end of the page reads:
It's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon. -- Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"
...according to the numbers, the pigeon transferred about 4194304 kilobytes (for the sake of argument, the BBC article says it transferred a 4GB Memory Stick, which I'll assume was filled up and that it can actually hold that much of data) in 7617 seconds, which is about 550 kilobytes per second in normal transfer speed. Not an unreasonable speed, a decent 6Mbps connection should be able to do that much.
The most expensive ADSL program advertised by Telcom is a 4096/512kbps program, which I think (at least in Greece) would get you speeds up to ~400 kilobytes per second. In NORMAL conditions.
But that is download speed. And the test measured upload speed. So the real figure they should be testing against is about 50 kilobytes per second in upload speed (at least in Greece it does, if uploading with a 512kbps upstream connection).
Still, 4% completed in 2 hours, 16 minutes and 57 seconds is about 22 kilobytes per second upstream, which is about 50% lower than what it should be. Still a very large margin.
That is all.
What about latency? Surely it is orders of magnitude larger with pigeons than with even worst possible fiber connections? We are talking minutes versus tens to hundreds of a second. Something anybody with knowledge on networks knows already. Then again, since for most IT companies bandwidth is more important than latency, I guess pigeons make more sense to them. In fact, that is what I would have used. Every time I had to send a gigabyte of media data back when I was in advertisement media business, I wish I had remembered about pigeons. So, for any case where latency is not a factor, pigeons rule. In all other cases however we need any kind of fiber.
50 Win points (TM) to whoever tagged this "half-duplex"
Negros could carry a lot more weight. With twenty or thirty 1GB hard drives in a backpack, I'm sure one of them could better the pigeon quite easily.
Maybe, but the pigeon might be a little more reliable. At least it wouldn't think of stealing your data medium (i.e., hard drives, USB sticks, etc.) and selling them on the black market.
In a (very) rough calculation I worked out that if they sent an 8GB card, then their net connection was a little over 43Kbps. I don't think even SA has stuck to modem implemented internet, so I would say they were probably sending more than 8GB.
Am I missing something?
A sense of humor, maybe?
... the bandwidth of a truck full of magtapes.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I would except the gentleman with mod points was being ironic. Whoosh.
Sounds like a competition one of my professors told us about when I was at school. He said they had a competition at school about sending data from point A on campus to point B. I supposed the idea was to test compression algorithms or something on the data and who could send the most data. My professor said they just started copying files on to a bunch of hard drives. Went to the bar and had drinks while they copied. Then came back, put the hard drives in the car and drove to point B. They won but were disqualified because it wasn't in the spirit of the competition.
Already been tried and tested....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
So I guess I can't play Quake Live in it, am I right?
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
A major source of packet loss...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You lie!
Actually, we know it was 4 GB and that in 2 hours the Telekom transferred only 4% of that data. Let's say approximately 4000 MB for ease of calculation. A whole 4% of that is 160 MB transferred in two hours.
Now bytes are not bits, and network speeds are usually specified in megabits per second. Allowing for handshake, headers, etc, and again going just for a rough ballpark figure, I'll take x10 for the bytes to bits conversion.
So it's 1600 megabits in 7200 seconds. 1600 / 7200 = 0.22 megabit / sec.
Honestly, even ADSL upload speeds in the western world tend to be better than that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You've got two empty halves of coconuts and you're bangin' 'em together!
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
From the article:
Well, that's because you used email. If you'd sent it pigeon post, it would have got through!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I could transfer 4gb faster by tossing an SD card across the room than I could by sending it over our LAN, that doesn't mean the LAN is bad, or slow, it just means that "a Truck full of harddrives has more bandwidth than the whole of the internet"[admitting that "whole of the internet" is a meaningless term in terms of bandwidth]- point being that bandwidth isn't everything
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
... of the quote at the bottom of the page as of 8:55AM (EST): "It's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon. -- Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"
Now all I have to do , is capture and train all the pigeons here in my downtown area, move to Africa, and start my own carrier pigeon company for all those interested in saving money and also having quicker file transfers, and I will be filthy rich!
Seriously though, it speaks volumes that a pigeon can carry a card with data faster then we can download...oh wait, this is in Africa,
so I guess its because its still a 3rd world country???
Why is everybody discussing the technical validity of using pigeons to transfer data? (except of course to generate semi-interesting puns and whatnot)
It is a PR stunt to get more non-technical people to take note of Telkom's practices putting a brake on parts of our economy. (nevermind the breaks our "government" is putting on...)
Patent application granted to "Telkom Communications" for a "method for transmitting data via avian carrier", even though lots of prior art exists.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
obviously, this setup does not conform to RFC1149
I fear that this might have been an unfair comparison, though. The pigeon was, after all, dedicated to only that one transfer.
For a more apples-to-apples comparison with most companies' networks, the pigeon should also be transporting:
- a porn DVD or two
- half the collection of lolcat movies on youtube
- and half the collection of funny clips
- a periodic refresh of Slashdot, in 1 second intervals.
- an IRC session on sexnet for the network admin. Logging connections doesn't apply to him, after all. You can contact him under the nickname Linda1991 faster than through the internal channels.
- a couple of managers' correspondence with the distressed widdow of a nigerian prince. Hey, they're only trying to help her.
- a trojan download or two, from those guys in marketing who got admin rights on their computer because they can't work without it. And now can't work without the latest animated gizmo off www.i-pwn-your-machine.ru.
- the keylogger traffic in the other direction from the couple more who already downloaded it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
ah, crap! I'm getting bombarded with pidgin-sent spam! asdfasfonga;f/klr;gs
and
I think it is safe to say that RFC 1149 is the way all our data will be transferred in the future.
It reminds me of what a friend who works doing IT for big banks is fond of saying:
"Nothing beats the bandwidth of a lorry full of tape travelling up the M1"
yeah but latency is a bitch
I for one hope that the new swallow transatlantic encrypted usb network, HirundoNet, but it's been delayed because of the experts can't decide on the most important point - African or European?
- I choked on the red pill and now I'm stuck in limbo
Sneaker net has always had the highest bandwidth recorded. Want to send 10 TB of data across the world? Would you try uploading it to their server, or sending 5 2TB hard drives by Fed Ex? Which one do you think will get there faster?
People have been doing this for quite some time.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. â"Tanenbaum, Andrew S
wow, now i get it. google is miles ahead than any of us! ... the folks at google weren't kidding, and probably using the page-rank pigeons in the african continent!
Looks like a similar method has been suggested before: RFC1149 :)
The internet isn't some pidgeon you can just dump stuff in, it's a series of tubes....
I sent an email to my staff via pidgeon and it arrived faster than the actual email sent via the network. That's because the bird only had to fly across the room. Of course, I could have just yelled my message, but this is the future... Where's my flying car? Now get off my lawn.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Assuming a 4 GB MicroSD card at 10 MiB/s, you're talking about roughly 7 minutes to load and unload the card at each end.
Now the fun part: my Comcast "high-speed" Internet is 6.6 mbps down, 1.1 mbps up, so a transfer from my house to a neighbor also using Comcast would max out at 1.1. Assuming a constant 1.1 mbps, that same 4 GB would take 10 hours to transfer. So it ain't just South Africa. :-)
Now, when we get to 32 GB, we're now talking about 80 hours. If I had to send someone 32 GB or more of data, it would make more sense to stuff the memory cards in a Priority Mail or Express Mail envelope and send it off.
Me to my wife: "Why should I upload it at 1.1 mbps so you can download it at 6.6 mbps while our home LAN is 1 gbps? :-)
Don't you mean "dumped"?
So the pigeon flew 50 miles in an hour? A pigeon can sustain 50 mph+?
Then your fired.
My fired what?
As a South African, there is a little more to the story. Yes, Telkom is appropriately nicknamed 'Hellkom', and yes, their data speeds are ridiculously slow, and notoriously unreliable (The standard line that most households can afford is 384kb, with 512kb lines being prohibitively expensive. All lines enjoy downtime at least once a month. Most large businesses make do with one or two 4MB lines). However, the company in question only leased their line from Telkom (who have a monopoly on all lines around here, more or less), and did not use Telkom as their ISP. This has allowed Telkom to completely escape any "blame" for the slow speeds. Also, 4gb was a remarkably optimistic chunk of data to try transfer. Most people in SA would never dream of trying to send that much data via the internet. Once could argue that the "race" was deliberately made impossible for Telkom to win. This doesn't excuse the fact that if the data packet had been 200MB the pidgeon probably still would have won. The main problem is education: people in this country do not know that they are entitled to faster lines at cheaper rates, and consider paying around $35p/m about right for a 384kb line capped at 1GB. If you shop around you can find the same line capped at 3GB for around $15, but most people do not know they have access to these prices. The irony is that Telkom has access to 20MB+ lines, and have never been able to legitimately explain why they cap lines, making it difficult for competing ISPs (Telkom is also an ISP) to offer reasonable prices. So glad this made it onto Slashdot!
I found this tide-bit rather interesting in the BBC article :
--
"Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have, to date, been accepted," Telkom's Troy Hector told South Africa's Sapa news agency in an e-mail.
--
I'm sure they (Telkom) have made recommendations, but at what cost?
In the Southern US, major packet loss to pigeons are caused by rednecks with shotguns.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Per the article the pigeon flies 50 mph. Suppose I want to transfer a 32 GB file, stored on a compact flash card, from one side of my town to the other, which is about 15 miles. The pigeon gives me a transfer rate of 24 Mbps. That's faster than any residential broadband in my area, and probably most peoples' areas, considering you're looking at upstream transfer rate. In my area the "high end" DSL option offers an upstream rate of 768 Kbps. Cable isn't much better.
Imagine the bandwidth of a truck full of pigeons.
watch out for bird flu i love you virus.
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
stealing your data medium (i.e., hard drives, USB sticks, etc.) and selling them
Just the media? Don't forget the data. That might be valuable too.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Wonderful! I've been waiting 20 years to see a real-world implementation of RFC1149 IP Datagrams over Avian Carrier. Looks like we're well on our way!
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
Snail Mail Still Winning The Bandwidth War - Estimates (back in 02) that Netflix bandwidth of shipping DVDs was about 1500 TB.
Twenty years ago, it was said that nothing had more throughput than a 747 full of CDs, except two 747s full of CDs.
Today you would replace 747s with a bigger aircraft and CDs with higher-capacity media.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The post office is a packet-switched network, where the packets are known as letters or parcels. A DNA sample sent through the mail may contain well more than 4GB in a single "packet."
For electronic packet-switched networks, there may be some applications where a 4GB packet is appropriate. If the cost of resending lost packets is very low even fi the packet size is huge and the overhead cost per packet is high but fixed per packet, a larger packet size might be in order. Maybe not 4GB, but very likely more than the typical ~1.5Kb for most LAN networks.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
.. is the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Pigeon?
Good bandwidth, but I think SA pigeon latency will be a bit of an issue thought. Playing L4D might be a bit on the choppy side...
The National Security Agency (NSA) has just released an RFP for "A global falconer intercept network"
They doped the pigeon. Am I the only one who is impressed by a pigeon that can fly 50 MPH sustained for 1 hour?
We don't know where the cabled network is lagging. For that matter we don't know if the people who wrote this article even know where the network is lagging. By the time some amount of data traverses from point A to point B it has passed through several routers, switches, etc. Just because the bandwidth was underachieving doesn't mean that the problem can't be solved with a sensible investment of time and resources.
Or of course they can just use birds.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
RFC1149 - Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
RFC2549 - IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html
We have gone full circle, pirates will require guns again.
I have FIOS and am paying for the "20/5" service but frequently it behaves as 25/20--easily 3 MB/s download, 2.3 MB/s upload. megaBYTES per second
Had to run? then we might have an epic quail.
I guess this makes DDOS attacks a lot more entertaining, what with beer, shotguns and landrovers. Pigeons I suspect have a better carbon footprint than routers.
Also of note, pigeon latency still better than Hughes net.
I mean, having an able-bodied, athletic bird compete against such a lame and fat organisation is just so unfair....
(Disclaimer: Not only do I live in ZA, I have done some contracting for said company.)
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
you're an idiot.
-anon
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Tanenbaum, Andrew S.
I'd much rather check the server logs than the pigeon logs to find out what the problem is!
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
We recently ran a similar experiment at work where we took 2 copies of a 50 page document and asked one student to scan and email it to the neighboring desk, and we got another student to hand deliver the second copy over the same distance.
The results were startling.
We have now opted to remove all computer equipment from our offices as we consider them inferior to manual transfer of information.
that's 4^ of 4gb in 2h6m47s, or
4*1000^3*0.04 * 8 / (3600*2 + 6*60 + 47) = 168266
I'd love to see Comcast tested in a similiar way.
The "truckload of hard drives" isn't fair from a throughput standpoint, but Comcast needs some bad press to make it upgrade its network.
So in this example we had a 4GB payload that took 2:07:57 to deliver which gives us a data rate of about 4.3 mb/sec. However, currently you can purchase 128MB USB sticks... This gives the homing pigeon a data rate of 136.6 mb/sec! Of course a 128GB USB stick is expensive, but not more so than a decent rack-mount gigabit switch.
~ Normality is merely the achievement of the mediocre...
4% of 4GB for 2 hours is about 24kb/s (bytes, not bits). I have a non-business internet connection (meaning, there's a chance you don't get the full capacity you're paying for as with business accounts where the ISP is likely to be sued if they do that) in the US (as in that place that is lagging behind the rest of the world in broadband speeds) and my upload is 32kb/s (bytes again). Yeah, I think their internet is pretty slow.
Even on slow-assed, jungle bandwidth I'll still PWN you and your clan in Battlefield. If I had to wait for the pigeon to crap out packets, your heads will still be exploding! Here come the pain, bitches!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
For off-site backup, never under estimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with data tapes.
For years, many of us in the Disaster Recovery business have said. "Never under estimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes."
Sometimes it's the managers, sometimes some BOFH, sometimes cheap third-party "specialized" personnel.
Problems and lies we have to bear from IT guys:
a) One hour waiting for a phone answer is ok.
b) If you register an incident, and a solution never comes -- it's ok, you have support.
c) Windows is easy to use and there's no way out.
d) Computers are problematic or too hard for the user.
e) If software is a problem, just pay more to M$ and don't think.
f) Broadband is whatever they deliver to you -- even if it's slower than dial-up.
g) Outages are a regular thing (other businesses call it "overbooking").
h) It's from M$: it can't be fixed... live with that.
i) Pay more because of this feature you never asked.
j) Pay even more to get that feature removed.
k) Pay more for software, but do spend on hardware, too.
l) If you're alone with a problem, don't annoy us -- how come others don't complain?
m) If others have the same problem -- well, don't complain as if you were the only victim.
n) Interoperability is promised, but non-existent -- not even between different versions of the same app!
o) Your data is no longer yours the minute you used _our_ file formats.
p) The network is down. What? Networks weren't supposed to get down? How so?
At the root of the problem is lack of competition.
It's imperative we enforce better and stronger competition to avoid practical monopolies like M$ and telecom.
There was a time when government was respected and companies lacking respect were split.
Yeah, I know, get off my lawn etc. etc. etc. ...bunch of idiots burning resources!
Huh? I... I don't know that. Auuuuuuuugh.....
The pigeon "took 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight"
Can pigeons fly 50 MPH? I guess so, see various animal airspeeds at http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/publications/nonpwdpubs/young_naturalist/animals/animal_speeds/index.phtml
300+ posts, and not one comparison of of the speed of a pigeon to an African Swallow... sigh...
Don't forget Tannenbaum: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.Computer Networks, 4th Ed. p. 91"
And sneakernets in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/
In case you were curious.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I worked with a small ISP for a while, and we joked that we had an RFC compliant backup data network. Yep, you guessed it. Pigeons. They would have been faster most of the time too, aside from the occasional bird bath and run in with angry falcons.
First of all, never underestimate the bandwidth of a vehicle with a number of hard disks in the boot. The bird was a good stunt which illustrates this fact and shows how abysmal the carrier's service is.
Now what?
If it were here, I'd call Ubiquity (ubnt.com) and / or other vendors and start creating the backbone that is so sorely needed. A little competition will improve things and a parallel carrier will lighten the load. It the quality and price point are superior, you would replace both the carrier and pigeon.
Or a shotgun.
Maw, what you season this pigeon with? It tastes like burnt plastic, like when you cook over the trash barrel.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum (1996)
It's an old saying, and I was curious how true it still is, so I started calculating relative bandwidth using modern media: http://www.francischang.com/tape/
Some of the figures:
WiMAX 9.375 MB/s
802.11n 31 MB/s
Gigabit Ethernet 125 MB/s
SDRAM 12.8 GB/s
E-150 Van full of magnetic tapes, New York to LA: 392 GB/s
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
...the bandwidth of a truck full of backup tapes.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I Africa, it's probably cheaper and faster to hire a marathon racer as courier than using the Telco anyway
Avians beat technology in speed test.
Variant:
In Backwards South Africa
Data-usage is accounted for in bushels of wheat
iBurst is the enemy #1. iBurst is a wireless 'broadband' provider in South Africa, and apparently several other countries. It is not HSDPA, or any other recognizable acronym -- it is a Kyocera-backed wireless protocol that one might reasonably expect would give a good internet experience. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iburst) Not in my case, however. I have been a subscriber to South Africa's iBurst service for more than two years. My signal strength is not magnificent, I get somewhere between 70% and 80% reported signal strength at all times. Late evenings and weekends, I can expect pretty good transfer rates. Very rarely do I experience any issues at all outside of office hours. However, I work from home. During daylight hours, during the week, I see about 90% of my http page requests fail. Almost all TCP requests close unexpectedly. I raised a call log with iBurst South Africa about this issue, requesting that somebody get back to me on this issue. I have had a couple of callbacks, requesting that I perform a speed test on my connection, however it's not even fast enough that I can even load the speed test flash file! I am now at the point of despair. I have called 15 times and spoken to 6 different representatives, over a period of about 3 weeks. Nobody useful ever gets back to me. iBurst advertises that they offer technical support 24/7, however when anyone attempts to call outside those times, a recorded message advises callers to retry in office hours. It's no surprise that a South African service provider can get away with poor service, and in fact no surprise either that they screw their users over. But it's not right. I work from home, and I rely on my internet connection to earn my living. It costs me R600 per month, which is around $80, for 3.5 gigabytes of data per month. Those of you in the first world, you can consider yourselves extremely lucky. Here I'm just lucky if I can actually download 3.5 gigs in the whole month in which I have paid for it. (I'm a software engineer working for a USA company, FYI) My own hypothesis is that the penny-pinching bastards have a tiny upstream connection that they pay peanuts for, and charge enormous amounts for their users to make use for -- which is, by definition, profiteering. In the absence of a class-action law here in South Africa, what are my options for getting just recompense for not only me but all those other poor sods who are being screwed over by iBurst? Do I start a petition? Open a case with the police? Approach the fair trading commission here? What?!?!?! I'm at a loss! c
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"A group of american scientist got so fed up with the internet speed between Los Angeles and San Francisco that they loaded their 1000 TB of data onto 1000 x 1 TB harddrives. They then proceeded to fill a truck with all drives and let the truck drive from LA to SF. It took the truck 12 hours to drive the distance. They started a transfer using the internet and while all the data had been transfered with the truck, their 1Gbit internet connection had only transfered 5.4 TB or about 0.5% of the data in the same time."
Why is this article news? There is nothing miraculous about it. It doesn't immediately say anything about South Africa. Most importantly, we've all been at the point where it was easier to get the data on disk, CD, DVDs, USB sticks, portable hard drives, than using the internet to transfer files from our friends or from work.
faster transfer, but the latency is a bitch.
Did they include the time required to send a pigeon to make the request?
and a pigeon to ACK to be sure it actually arrived?
what if the pigeon got lost? what is the timeout on a pigeon?
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Look at latency people. Not just the throughput.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
The real solution would be a wireless pigeon network
Everyone connects to their nearest pigeon, which then passes the packets to the next pigeon.
Actually i think i just designed cellphone networks with movable towers
The scary thing is even with vast packet loss it would still be faster than "Hellkom"
Oh sorry, forgot to mention that the upload speed you get is usually half the download speed, so for that 384Kbit line you'd perhaps get 192Kbit/s upload speed, which is 0.19 megabit / sec.
Not to defend the South African internet quality, of which I know nothing, but I don't really think this is anything more than an advertising stunt. One can prove that just about any method is "faster" than, say, a 1 Tbit line, if one is allowed to load an unlimited amount of data on your alternative transport medium. So how about loading a barge with 500 tons of DVDs packed with data or something like that? Is transport by barge going to be faster than a 1Tbit line? It is easy to make it look that way.
Trained Carrier Pigeon / Idiot-Proof
or considering it's connectionless
Untrained Dopey Pigeon / Instant Poo
"Station wagon full of tapes" sounds like a '60s or '70s reference.
In any case, I heard the 747 version in the 80s or early 90s, well before 1996.
I suppose the original version was something along the lines of "never underestimate the bandwidth of a chariot full of papyrus."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A pigeon will be able to outdo any electronic network, given a sufficiently large amount of data to transmit. :-)
They're using Comcast then?
I had a 14.4 modem on my bbs in the early 90s and it was pretty speedy for back then. I had some poor user that had a 1200 baud modem. I had this ANSI file of Dream Theater's Images and Words album cover on a random logon script with Renegade. I would catch him sometimes, I knew it was him, he was my only 1200 baud caller, and the ANSI would show 3 lines and I'd see "no carrier". Then the modem would pick up, and I'd see 1200 baud again. I'm sure he was praying he didn't get that ANSI again.
Poor guy, he did eventually get a faster modem but this story reminded me of that. I always thought it would have been faster to drive a floppy over with the ANSI on it than for him to sit there and watch it scroll S L O W L Y across his screen.
Good times!
At my company the internet is still faster. Because the data would be shipped (flown) to the purchasing agent. She would sit on it for a few days to a week. Then it would be forwarded to my department where it would sit on my boss' boss' desk for at least a full day. If I'm fortunate I'll get it the day after. Sometimes I just have to know when to expect it (through premonition) and go looking for the package.
With Intellegent Epidemic Routing this could actually work as a viable - if time delayed - networking system.
P.S. What is up with the Slashdot comment form? The text box is only about 20 characters wide.
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."
Here's a shocker...............Telkom buys it's internet from AT&T............eply