Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet
Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet
Can a pigeon with 3 TB of flash drives outrun gigabit ISP transfers?
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
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway"
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
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.
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.
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.
Lag is a real bitch 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.
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
💀
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.
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
Get back to me when a pigeon can deliver high-speed porn.
it already can, multiple terabytes at once
But that latency is just too high.
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/4pz2kMxCu8I
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers.
Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin.
Famously, in 2009, a South African company compared the transfer speed of a pigeon carrying a 4 GB memory stick vs local ISP Telkom’s ADSL service.
So, he donned a pigeon mask and jumped on a plane to carry 3 TB of files from his home in the US to the Canadian data center, which the internet transfer also targeted.
To conclude, Geerling says he could have easily done better as PiJeff, stuffing his luggage with very high capacity drives, but wanted to stick to the common 3 TB across all alternatives.
Hopefully, another decade later, we will all have broadband measured in petabits, and pigeons won’t have to endure having flash NAND devices strapped to their legs for our amusement (research).
The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of
tapesflashdrives hurtling down the highway.For price per TB, modern tapes might still be a valid choice actually. But maybe not great for read/write performance. I guess that depends on how many tape drives you have on each end.
I'm reminded of this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
I was looking for this comment just to post:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
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?
A single packet takes longer to reach the destination, but that single packet can contain shittons of data. Ingenious! Of course... This assumes the packet actually arrives.
Packet loss is a pretty major risk with IPoAC.
What's the ping on that bird?
did it count the time to load the data onto the hdd and unload it at the other side?
how much time would it take to move 3tb onto a usb3 hdd?
Idk, but depending on your use case, you can probably use the data straight from the drive without transferring it to local storage.
In that case you could also just remotely access the usb stick through the internet without transfering all the data. In the video the guy includes the upload time from the USB stick. USB sticks can transfer data at up to 5gbit/s so it is still faster against a 1 gbit/s internet connection.
I was lucky enough to have 2Gb fiber introduced to my area recently - I have to say I rarely notice meaningful differences over my lowest tier cable connection. I pull 1400Mbs on router based tests, but routine endpoint speed tests are 300-700 range. Was 30 on prior connection. Can run more stuff all at once, but still get occasional streaming delays, 5min of low resolution streams, routine downloads are about the same. Now that Mullvad has dropped port forwarding, this pigeon system is sounding pretty attractive.
Yeah, but what about those upload speeds? Most cable providers give large download bandwidth, but next to nothing on your upload speeds. Synchronous connections are always best!
I have 5Gbps in download and 2.5Gpbs in upload!
I wish that pigeon can send me approximately 3000 pictures of the Atomium
That's specific
It's for irony sake
very variable
Who doubted that sneakernet would be faster?
I knew this was clickbait.
It's actually the latest Jeff Geerling video and it was partly tongue in cheek
Flash storage has come a long way in 10 years!