Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet::A decade ago, a pigeon with a 4 GB memory stick outran an ISP’s ADSL service. A 2023 rematch features a bird with 3 TB of flash drives vs gigabit internet.
Yeah, but having that ping time of 36,000,000ms really kind of sucks.
Error-correction for dropped packets is also pretty shit.
What if you make it carry N+M separate flash drives configured in a Raid Z(M) format… allowing for up to M-1 dropped packets.
That help ensure data integrity provided the pigeon gets there, but would not help the pigeon get there any faster.
Oops I think I replied to the wrong comment lol
Someone commented about error coreection
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway”
Interestingly enough NASA still sends data this way. Huge HDD delivered by hand. Not all data, but I remember reading about some satellite images and similar data where latency doesn’t matter. Can’t beat good old box full of HDD.
I wondered why NASA was using pigeons till I read the rest of your comment.
yep, radio telescopes send data this way, thats how SETI@home got the Arecibo data
I’m not the original author:
Trebuchets are the most technologically advanced siege engines of all time, and are capable of hurling a 90kg stone over 300m using a counterweight.
With this in mind, we can perform the following calculations:
A 22TB WD Red Pro drive weighs 670g, with a maximum hurl weight of 90kg, trebuchet can hurl 134 drives at once, totalling 2,948 TB of data.
The average speed of a trebuchet projectile is 54m/s and the average size of an American ‘block’ is 100m. Lets presume 3 blocks to get our full trebuchets use (fuck you catapults).
It’ll take 5.5 seconds for the projectile to go from launch to dramatic landing, meaning a throughput of 536TB a second.
Therefore, trebuchets are the best transfer method.
All of these methods have extreme bandwidth but terrible latency and packet loss.
Just use half the bandwidth for redundancy.
Poor HDDs
In a real world scenario this would need to account for protection to the storage devices to prevent damage and potential loss of data from damage
Haha, in some parts of germany you can do that yourself. on foot. with a zipdisk.
Good ole sneakernet. It’s hard to have dropped packets when they’re delivered by hand
It’s not. Just drop the storage device in a manhole, or get mugged, or break it in some way. Also when you do so, pretty much all packets are lost and to retransmit you need to go back to the point of origin and make a new copy, assuming you still have the original.
Recovery after a lost packet is pretty awful, I’ll give you that
Can’t help but think that they are rigging this for the bird. Just calculate how long it takes the bird to get from here to there and then pick a capacity that takes longer to download.
Yes and no.
If you could put a 1 petabyte flash drive on a pigeon, it would easily crush the gigabit internet
Does a 1 petabyte flash drive exist? Could it exist?
They put 3 stripped-down terabyte flash drives on the pigeon. Could it carry more weight?
You get to the point where the pigeon can’t carry the weight.
All this is saying that sending data by pigeon can be faster and using 3 tb sticks proves it.
If it needed to be 4 tb, then they would have had to use 4 sticks. If it couldn’t carry 4 sticks, then you have your answer that the pigeon can’t do it with current technology.
you’re saying that a 12-ounce bird can carry no more than three flash drives?
You missed the point of what I was saying
2 tb flash drives are expensive but exist
Pigeon could carry 4 tb in 2 flash drives worth of weight.
But simply 3 1 tb drives a pigeon can carry so they did that.
If they had to transfer 5 tb of data to win. 3 2 tb drives would have worked.
This article just states that a pigeon can carry 3 1 tb drives and deliver it faster than gigabit internet.
They didn’t need to push the envelope anymore
So yes they calculated that the pigeon could carry 3 drives and that 3 tb was all that was needed to carry to win.
But they didn’t set up the experiment to favor the pigeon. They set it up to prove it could be done that way.
There are no winners or losers here and they are not suggesting you start uploading things via pigeons, just gives a more interesting way to talk about and get people to think about how large volumes of data can and are still moved around via trucks and ships.
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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of flash drives. The latency’s most annoying though.
The ever lasting war between bandwidth and latancy
its like they choose 3 TB because they knew it was the smallest amount that would lose. lets make it a real re-match and go back to transfering 4 GB.
Lag is a real bitch though…
I’d like to see that pigeon fly from Sydney to New York.
I once signed up for a cloud backup service that would mail out a HDD so the user could backup to that, mail it to them, seed the data on the backup servers, and then let the user start doing incremental backups. FedEx, round trip, was faster than uploading it all over the network.
I can’t remember who (probably all of them) but one of the fang companies offers a service where they’ll send you a truck with a huge backup server in a shipping container to do an on site backup to drive back to their cloud servers (for similar reasons.)
I wrote a similar blog post recently, about magnetic tapes in minivans. https://www.humancode.us/2023/02/03/a-minivan-full-of-magnetic-tape.html
I really have to fight the neck beard in me to not aKchutually the shit out of fun stuff like this.
It’s a classic example in education to demonstrate the difference between bandwidth and latency. Extremely high bandwidth, but also extremely high latency. It’s not for practical use, it’s a thought experiment to explain something that’s often counterintuitive to students that are just starting out learning about networking.
When can I start using a pigeon to preload games like Starfield?
Used to be called “install disks” that you would have to preorder for the convenience of having it available at your local game store
💀
Is the time of loading and downloading the files from the flash drives of the pigeon included?
Yes it was. Though he did use faster SSD drives rather then cheaper and slower flash drives. Which is something reasonable to do IMO. He also tested various network transfer methods to use the fastest one and transferred unique data to each drive rather then just uploading the same file over and over giving both sides a fair but also their best shot at working.
The pigeon is the flash drive and has a much higher transfer rate than a commercial flash drive.
I can carry way more HDDs than that weakass stupid pigeon. So what I can’t run to save my life.
Isn’t gigabit internet more about amounts of data you can transfer rather than the overt speed that is not important to average user?
