Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet

Yeah, but having that ping time of 36,000,000ms really kind of sucks.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway"

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.

Haha, in some parts of germany you can do that yourself. on foot. with a zipdisk.

See also IP over Avian Carriers - Wikipedia

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.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of flash drives. The latency's most annoying though.

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...

When can I start using a pigeon to preload games like Starfield?

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.

Get back to me when a pigeon can deliver high-speed porn.

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

The actual video this article was based on

Is the time of loading and downloading the files from the flash drives of the pigeon included?

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes flashdrives hurtling down the highway.

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?

I'm reminded of this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

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!

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.

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.

What's the ping on that bird?

I wish that pigeon can send me approximately 3000 pictures of the Atomium

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?

very variable

Who doubted that sneakernet would be faster?

Flash storage has come a long way in 10 years!

I knew this was clickbait.