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

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 603 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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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...

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.

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

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

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.

1 more...

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.

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 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.

You forgot about the interference (bird shit) it'll cause with other things throughout the data highway

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.

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.

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

it already can, multiple terabytes at once

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.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes flashdrives 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 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?

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).

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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!

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.

With enough cables you could in theory transfer all of them at the same time. To max out the speed you could have each SSD be in a stack of 20 that plugs into a couple of pcie.

I'm pretty sure you can do it in 15 minutes with a well coordinated team and a lot of smart hardware, packaging and freight loading/unloading technology.

Yes but not as safe and not as reliable, also not viable over long distances. Furthermore its a one directional transfer.

IPoAC isn't one-way, but it's definitely less reliable. Unfortunately, packets can be lost due to encapsulation from birds of prey, and bad weather also increases dropped packets

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