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.
oh, that’s what’s on my car.
Also having to manually bring the pigeon back to the launching site, because pigeons only work one way.
What if you attached two one-way pigeons together to make a two-way pidgeon? It would probably take a piece of string, and a coconut…
Its UDP man
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
It was 10 years ago so I don’t know what is the practice now but the “offsite backup” solution in my office was taking a hard drive to a safe at the local bank.
Every week someone would go to the bank to switch the drive that is stored there.
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.
You’ve heard of RAID but have you ever tried SEIGE?
Poor HDDs
If you use Western Digital, the HDDs won’t notice the extreme transfer method. They’ll be unreadable either way
Only download, no upload… Dammit leechers
At this point why not get a 30 ton truck to carry all those WD Red Pros? Sure you can only go 30 m/s but the carrying capacity is much greater!
100 petabytes in a truck from 2016
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.
That’s kind of the point though. It’s not about practicalities.
There is an ancient proverb.
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes.”Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
Is he the guy to blame for The Royal Tanenbaums?
/j
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.
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.
We need to RAID pigeons in case of hawk outage.
More redundancy!RAID: Redundant Avians Indemnifying Death
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.
So you’re saying it’s a simple question of weight ratios?
But what if it was an African Swallow?
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See also IP over Avian Carriers - Wikipedia
also the followup: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service
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.
In that case: Time appropiate storage size.
i guess im confused why 3 TB was chossen. what is this representing. Most people are not transfering 3 TB on a regular basis, 100 GB is a large transfer for common cases. who is this information for? who should be looking into pigeons/jets for regular multi-TB data transfers. just sounds like pigeon propaganda to me.
birds arent real is leaking… Neat :D
Most people are not transfering 3 TB on a regular basis
The usual Joe? Yep.
Off site backup is usually out of question except for datahoarders and businesses. But they might benefit from it.
Lag is a real removed though…
Yea, and packet size is enormous, so one lost packet is catastrophic…
This is why you use TCP: Trusted Concurrent Pigeons.
Trusted Pigeons so that a simple hash check can prove the veracity of your data AND provide a free dedupe / data integrity check for when multiple/single packets arrive.
Concurrent Pigeons so that transmission issues don’t impact latency (throughput is essentially unlimited here, assuming sufficient pigeons)
Downsides include needing to implement a pigeon cache and power (birdfood) requirement increases.
You forgot about the interference (bird shit) it’ll cause with other things throughout the
datahighway
Telnet sucks bad with Pigeonet
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
💀
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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.
Yeah, this is super dumb. It’s too dumb for me to akchually it though.
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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.)
Amazon snowmobile it’s called. Let’s you uoad to s3 that way.
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He included those transfers as well. He used usb sticks with an actual SSD chip, since those are faster to read/write from.
If it’s mounted, what’s the difference?
I’d like to see that pigeon fly from Sydney to New York.
I wouldn’t. Sounds boring.
The pigeon wins up to around 600 miles
Does it? I’m reading 600-700 miles is a one day range for a pigeon. At a gigabit, we’re talking only 400 minutes to do 3TB, which is under seven hours. Now I don’t know what the pigeon union looks like, but I’m going to assume a day of flying for a pigeon is at least 8 hours.
A pidgeon could carry at least 20 microSD cards.
But could it carry a coconut?
This reminds me of the age when the egregiousness of home Internet data overage charges in Canada reached their zenith, with some back of the napkin math, I realized it would be more cost effectuvd to buy and fill a solid state drive (which had only begun to come down in price) with stuff, ship it overnight international, and then destroy it after downloading its contents, than to hit the overage charge limit with my provider.
