When Movies Fly: How Modern Internet Experience Is Made Possible by Airplanes

https://www.flexport.com/blog/the-internet-is-powered-by-airplanes/

by coffeebite • 10 years ago

60 32 10 years ago

flexport.com

kwhitefoot• 10 years ago

Why wouldn't something like BitTorrent be faster?

SixSigma• 10 years ago

BitTorrent is a CDN.

But it's still quicker to put a box of HDs on a plane from Miami to New Zealand than to wait until the data has propagated.

creshal3• 10 years ago

The bottlenecks are the undersea cables and satellites needed for intercontinental data exchange.

Planes stacked full of HDDs have a lot of bandwidth.

s_dev• 10 years ago

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

– Andrew Tanenbaum

My own CS professor used to use a similar analogy of a donkey carrying hard drives on his way to New Zealand. I think most us probably had a CS professor that used similar analogies, as it quickly distinguishes between latency and bandwidth.

yesiamyourdad• 10 years ago

Tanenbaum may well have not been using an analogy. He might have been talking from personal experience.

I have a co-worker whose father worked in the Bay area during the 70's and 80's. Back then computer time was expensive and not many places could afford to install high quality hardware (basically the 70's mainframe is the 2010's data center - there are relatively few). So people who wanted work done would have to ship their tapes over to the computer and have their job run. My friend's father was one of these couriers who would run the tapes around in the back of his station wagon.

joshyeager2• 10 years ago

My grandma tells a story about when her husband and her brother were running an experiment in grad school that needed computer analysis in the middle to tweak the final run. The problem was that their lab was on one side of Oakland, and the only computer they had access to was a mainframe on the other side of the city. And they only had the lab for one night.

So that night they had Grandma sit outside the lab in her car. As soon as their first run was done, they ran the punch cards with the results out to her. She drove across the city and started the computer run while they reset the experiment. As soon as the run finished, she drove the new cards back to them.

They ran their second experiment, got their results, and got the best grade in their class.

The way Grandma tells it is that she was driving 90mph across the city in her brother's Corvette at 3am. I'm not sure how true that part is...

rkangel• 10 years ago

This sounds suspiciously like rubbish to me, at least in the general case. There are too many videos that need distributing in a short time for this to be how the problem is generally solved. Think of a recently uploaded YouTube video, or the coverage of a sports event that's now available on your Catch Up TV provider (iPlayer, NFL Now, etc.).

As a way of seeding the contents of a new CDN node when it's built, I can believe this. As a way of continuously synchronising an existing node, I have more trouble believing it.

7952• 10 years ago

Yes I agree with the sceptisim. Although if you were trying to reduce access time for rarely accessed data and had sufficient volume it could be worth doing.

afsdfsadf• 10 years ago

Then why does Amazon S3 offer a "ship us your disk" service?

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/

legulere• 10 years ago

Another thing I find interesting about the speed of light is that the Internet of today wouldn't be possible in the same form as here on possible settlements on the moon and not at all on the Mars

Cyph0n• 10 years ago

You mean on the planets themselves, or between Earth and Mars or the moon?

creshal3• 10 years ago

Between. Although connectivity to the moon should be fine, pings in the order of 3-4 seconds happen regularly on Earth, too. From personal experience I can attest that WoW is perfectly playable with pings of up to 5 seconds.

Network connectivity between Earth and Mars is going to be a slow affair, though, and will require relay satellites for when the Sun is between the planets.

A worst case round trip time of 45 minutes definitely won't be fun with TCP.

aembleton• 10 years ago

"In the 75 minutes it took for the pigeon to fly 120 kilometers, only 24% of Brumfield’s video was uploaded."

TIL pigeons can average 60MPH for 75 minutes: https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%28%28120%2F1.6%29%2F...

jameshart• 10 years ago

Yes, the average airspeed velocity of an unladen homing pigeon is around 50mph, so with a moderate following wind that doesn't seem unrealistic.

imagex• 10 years ago

Not entirely sure whether or not this is a Monty Python reference.

liw• 10 years ago

Imagine someone who travels around the world with a suitcase of SSDs to deliver data... possibly for criminals, big corporations, or governments. Johnny Mnemonic meets Transporter except plausible.

PaulHoule• 10 years ago

I am not so sure it is physics but accidents of economics business and Engineering. Companies have not been so enthusiastic to put optic fiber to where people live. Also the TCP protocol doesn't support really fast connection when you're going up to a gigabit or so. There is a company with a patented protocol based on UDP that companies like Disney use to move big video files around.

icebraining• 10 years ago

As fibre optics develops, so do storage device densities, though. You can now get a 3.5" drive with 8TBs, which would take 2+ hours to transmit at 1Gbps, even assuming perfect bandwidth utilization.

fulafel• 10 years ago

1 Gbps is copper speeds from 10+ years ago though. Current fast last mile fiber would be 40g ethernet. Here's a NIC to go with that:http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/07/27/new-enhancements-boost-che...

ancientworldnow2• 10 years ago

I believe you're talking about Aspera, recently bought by IBM. It's pretty fast and reliable and I've never had a problem with it over even residential Internet speeds ( many master files for delivery well over 100GB). Bitmax is the big CDN that uses it for media delivery.

http://asperasoft.com/technology/transport/fasp/

Karunamon• 10 years ago

There's a free alternative I have to talk up any time Aspera gets mentioned, and that's GridFTP by way of Globus Connect.[1] It's pitched as a way to move massive quantities of research data around, but it's free for personal/academic use and dead simple to set up.

There's a standalone command line client too [2], but it requires a bit more knowledge of how to tweak the settings, while Aspera and the Globus client does a lot of auto ranging stuff.

In any case, both of them will easily get you line speed from your slowest node.

[1] https://www.globus.org/

[2] http://toolkit.globus.org/toolkit/data/gridftp/quickstart.ht...

chrismbarr• 10 years ago

I had to do this once. I went on a trip to Africa with an organization where I shot tons of photos and HD video. In the end, I had over 100GB total, and they needed my source footage to edit videos and such. I lived in Florida, and the editor lived in Georgia. We tried dropbox, but that just was going to take weeks.

Our plan? He went to Best Buy, got a USB hard drive & mailed it to me. I loaded it up with footage and mailed it back to him. Once he got it, I think he was even able to return the hard drive and get his money back. The only expense was postage, and we saved a lot of time.

mttddd• 10 years ago

I work in the ediscovery industry, we very regularly need to send large collections which can easily be a TB+ to another location on short notice. One of our favorite things to do with new folks is have them hop on a plane with a hard drive, give it to someone at the airport, and get right back on the same plane.

bluedino• 10 years ago

Netflix ships the open connect boxes out fully loaded, right? Do they push new popular content down from time to time or what?

feld• 10 years ago

nightly -- they want a 10gbit link dedicated to the box for refreshing content

MaximillianII• 10 years ago

The American company I work for once decided that the shared folders of the German team should be located on an American server. So they flew the hard drives to the USA over a week-end. Then the Germans complained because of the time it took them to open their excel files. So the company had to fly the hard drives back to Germany. Anecdotal, but a good example IMHO.

When Movies Fly: How Modern Internet Experience Is Made Possible by Airplanes

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