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

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 604 points – Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet
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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.

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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

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.

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