sneakernet calculation

brian carroll electromagnetize at gmail.com
Thu Sep 26 11:32:56 PDT 2013


On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 06:00:55PM -0500, brian carroll wrote:
>
>> i imagine most with mathematical instinct would think something
>> 'real-world' is missing in this approximation, in that you could not
>> realistically use-up all FedEx resources for such a data sharing project
>> without likely taking down the system or being denied access- and thus
>> existing traffic and congestion are not included in this ideal naive
model.
>
> You overestimate the amount of useful content the Internet
> carries. Let's assume you just want to deliver text messages
> hand-entered by people. Let's say 10^9 people/day care to
> enter some ~kByte of text. That's a mere TByte/day, uncompressed.

 interesting... (seems related to direct crypto messaging rather than
 encoding audiovisual file types and transport encryption issues) and
 thus: a billion people who want to exchange digital text files (~1 kB).

 in a FedEx approach to transport of physical media, this is assumed
 to involve 1 billion separate "harddrives" or other disks for digital files
 that are going to move from one location or user to another, elsewhere

 so a billion 'packets' that need to be packaged in FedEx folders, have
 addressing and routing information attached, though firstly removed
 from equipment and then lastly reinstalled in other remote equipment
 to complete the data exchange.

 could a billion people feasibly call FedEx up today and go through
 this process of taking drives out, etc., and have the packages arrive
 ("today" in analogous terms, though 'next-day' is the gimme here)
 where the delivery is successful, no hardware failures that require
 automatic resends- likely instantaneous for packet-switch though
 for courier this could be a week span or more, to figure issues out.

 so out of the blue, a billion packets injected into the delivery stream
 of FedEx to arrive same-day or next-day, successful, to another
 billion addresses else some large majority (some packages go
 to the same address etc. and congestion/traffic issues with that,
 in that there may be a limit to what local resources are available).

 i would assume -no- this could not occur without denial of service
 or delay within routing or existing delivery schedules, and likely is
 beyond the daily tolerance level within the given bandwidth available,
 and to do this day after day would crash the FedEx delivery system
 perhaps because it is not designed or capable for 'data' delivery in
 the sense it may be unique from 'material' delivery of physical stuff
 versus used as a communication system for relaying messages

 (understandably this correlates with list messaging likewise)

~
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