Pigeon Net vs. South African ISP in 2009
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Here's a news article on it:
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/pigeon-protocol-offers-faster-data-delivery-155503 -
2009 was a good year for publicity of Pigeon Net.
The above event inspired this one:
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/australian-internet-fails-pigeon-test-159232 -
In many cases, even where there is Gigabit WAN links, it is still faster to drive tapes across town.
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There is a common quote of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes" which probably originated from Dennis Ritchie.
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@scottalanmiller said:
There is a common quote of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes" which probably originated from Dennis Ritchie.
According to link #1, it was Dr. Warren Jackson... but I wasn't even around when that was supposed to have been said...
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I actually remember reading about it. it was quite interesting.
I wonder if anything changed since then.
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@gjacobse said:
I actually remember reading about it. it was quite interesting.
I wonder if anything changed since then.
Well pigeons probably have not gotten any faster. The biggest question would be how the ISP's bandwidth has increased compared to the potential sizes of SD cards. I would put dollars to donuts that the SD card sizes have grown faster.
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In 2009 they tested this with a 700MB file. It took 70 minutes for the pigeon to do it. The ISP failed completely. A car took twice as long (but could carry a lot of tapes.) The pigeon, basically, has 50% the latency overhead of the car but can't carry a fraction as much information. The ISP is effectively useless.
If in 2009 the pigeon could do 700MB in 70 minutes, today it could do 512GB in the same time! That's like an 800x increase in speed.
Current pigeon speeds would be 7GB per minute or 122MB/s which is 975Mb/s. Pigeons in Australia are basically matching Gigabit Fiber speeds!!
