SA's Largest Telecomms Provider vs. a Pigeon 149
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the may-the-best-bird-win dept.
from the may-the-best-bird-win dept.
dagwud writes "Just a few days after this Slashdot article, South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service), is being pitted against a homing pigeon to see which can deliver 4GB of call centre data logs quickest over a distance of around 80km (50 miles). According to the official website, the race is set to take place September 10."
Re:Doesn't mention their monopoly (Score:2, Interesting)
They should have tested this on the Comrades Marathon 2009 (89km), giving one of the runners the memory stick, and see him/her finish before the 4GB download completes at the finish line.
HP's CPIP in the 80's (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bandwidth? (Score:4, Interesting)
I doubt it. But assuming current technology, the 18 wheeler wins hands down easily. I'll use Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive as my baseline. Looking at it's size and weight, it turns out that the weight is the main limiting factor. Without special permits, a semi-tractor trailer is limited to 80,000 lbs gross weight. Assuming 50,000 lbs is actually usable for cargo, then at 1.371 lbs per drive, the truck can carry 36,500 drives. The volume that many drives is far less than the volume of a 28 ft trailer. So we're talking a single truck load of drives is about 36.5 petabytes.
Now how long would that take to transmit at T1 speeds? 1544000 bits per second = 193,000 bytes per second (yes, I'm ignoring any framing or overhead. Shame on me). Doing the math, I get a transmission time of almost 5993 years.
With that amount of time, I'll assume the truck can travel cross country in 3 days. But to be generous, I'll give it a week. I'll assume assume the handling time for the hard drives is the same at both ends. So in order for the truck to be faster, I have to handle 36,500 hard drives in a total time of less than 2996 years at each end. So I have a budgeted time of only 29.98 days per hard drive at each end.
Somehow, I suspect it would take a lot less time than that.......
Re:Bandwidth? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not relevant. The truck wins.
Let's make some conservative assumptions:
Time on the road is 166.667 hours or 20.833 days at 8 hours per day, which we'll round up to 21. Add a day each for loading and unloading and we're at 23 days.
In the same 23 days the T1 is busy for 3600 seconds an hour, 24 hours a day. That's a total of 1987200 seconds at 1.544 Mbps (202375 B/s), or 402159.6 million bytes, or just under 403 Gigabytes.
To beat the T1, the truck needs to carry 11 hard drives. They will fit comfortably on the passanger seat.
Each HDD will take 1.2 hours to download, plus 1 hour overhead for connecting and disconnecting. That's 24.2 hours total but the IT monkey only works 8 hours a day so it's going to take 4 days to transfer onto the servers (damn that 0.2 ...).
During those 4 extra days the T1 is still busy and gets another 69.94 Gigabytes. Looks like we'll actually have to pack _12_ drives into the truck for a total of 480 Gb, beating the T1's 473 Gb over the same period (27 days).
Less conservative assumption: using a 320Gb external USB drive and a motor cycle at 50mph (8 hours per day) you'll make the trip in 8 days, more than doubling the T1's bandwidth.
Re:Lunch... (Score:3, Interesting)