This reminds me of the old saying "never under estimate the through-put of a station wagon full of hard drives". It looks like it has disappeared from the internet but at one time someone had a calculator where you could enter the number of hard drives your station wagon could hold, the size of the hard drives and the time it took to drive across town from data center A to data center B and would tell you what bandwidth you would need to transfer the same amount of data using FTP. I suppose you could make the same calculation if you could make the MTU size larger that the carrier pigeon was carrying.
This is still true in astronomy. Data between radio telescopes for VLBI or the EHT is shipped in disk packs. I am not sure how Ice cube gets their data back from antartika, but I don't think it is over the thin and expensive satellite internet. Data from the gamma ray telescopes HESS and Magic are transported to their data centers on tapes.
I had an occasion 20-ish years ago to deliver a few DLT tape drives and a bunch of cartridges to a Customer. Before I left we calculated the capacity of a 1995 Geo Metro as a unit of backup media, and the effective throughput from our shop to the Customer at various driving speeds in bits-per-second. It was an odd trip thinking about my speed in Mbps.
Today, or course, it would be a Chevy Spark stuffed with micro-SD cards... >smile<
