
When Movies Fly: How Modern Internet Experience Is Made Possible by Airplanes - coffeebite
https://www.flexport.com/blog/the-internet-is-powered-by-airplanes/
======
rkangel
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.

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

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-
data/](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/)

------
s_dev
“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
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.

~~~
joshyeager
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...

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chrismbarr
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
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.

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liw
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.

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aembleton
"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...](https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%28%28120%2F1.6%29%2F75%29*60)

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

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MaximillianII
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.

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

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

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PaulHoule
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.

~~~
ancientworldnow
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/](http://asperasoft.com/technology/transport/fasp/)

~~~
Karunamon
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/](https://www.globus.org/)

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

~~~
ancientworldnow
This is great, thanks for mentioning it. I'll definitely dig in and give it a
trial run!

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

~~~
creshal
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.

~~~
davidiach
I often think about that. What would a solution to this problem look like?

Will interstellar communication really be almost as difficult as interstellar
travel?

~~~
creshal
I think people shouldn't get their panties in a bunch. Letters used to take
months to travel from one end of a continent to another for some 3600 years
and people coped just fine. We won't have near-real-time chat, but the rest of
the internet ecosystem will work as before. Mail, forums, cat videos, etc. pp.
will work fine.

The engineering problem is already solved for probe communications anyway.

------
kwhitefoot
Why wouldn't something like BitTorrent be faster?

~~~
SixSigma
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.

