@Garrick

That’s no joke, I live in South Africa and while you can get fast Internet, it will cost you a fortune thanks the the wonders of limited undersea cables and telecoms monopolies. Winston the pigeon became a hero for a while.

The fastest available connection is 4096kbps ADSL and that will cost you a basic monthly fee of +- $60 without any data. Data will set you back +- $8 for 1GB shaped and +- $14 for an unshaped connection.

I have a 384kbps uncapped, shaped line and all told it sets me back +- $160 per month.

Be very grateful you live in a less regulated environment.

Latency is just as important as bandwidth for most Internet applications. One better not look at the ping-time statistics if one wants to get to the conclusion that “FiOS loses to a pedestrian”.

@ Zel:

Yep, good point. Copying the information to the portable media on which it will be carried should be included in the transfer time. Also, we should probably include the time it takes to copy it back when it reaches the destination.

I don’t thing the “time to gather” the data should count. After all, you need to gather the data to transfer it over the network as well.

At that point, it really boils down to what you are using. If you are trying to test Gigabit ethernet link against USB 1.0 drive the network might actually win. If you are trying to test USB 2.0/Firewire against 1.5/756 DSL link on the other hand…

Sneakernet ? I never heard this term before, although I used a somewhat similar method some years ago : sending and receiving CDs through mail was cheaper than the huge telephone bills I would have had sending the files through a 56k modem.

Anyway, the comparison is not valid unless the actual copy time is counted as well. Either the time needed to gather and copy the data on the disk to be simply given to the recipient, or the time to do said copy at the recipient’s home. Just taking the hard drive to a friend’s house across the street won’t do. This may sound negligible, but it’s usually the step that requires the longest time when I exchange files with some nearby friends.

If it’s possible to cap the storage device’s I/F speed with a given link (which is not that hard even for SATA2 devices, using any optical fiber direct link), Sneakernet actually takes longer since the travel/setup time has to be added to the (optimal in both cases) copy time. It may not be applicable to Verizon’s FiOS, but it can certainly be in local area networks.

@ Garrick:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm

This reminds me of an article regarding a company in South Africa that put a carrier pigeon with a 4gb thumb drive verses their local broadband provider.

“Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data. ”

For large data transfers, my workplace tends to use FedEx to overnight CD’s and DVD across the globe. That is much faster, more reliable, and usually more secure than file transfers.

Assuming no packetloss in the above scenario, yes, carrying it by hand would be faster. But what happens if the carrier gets hit by a bus?

I have FIOS and the one time I tested it I was getting a consistent 20mbps down and 8mbps up. That’s fast enough for me to login to remote servers and use Vim. *shrugs*