I’m doing a bit of policy work around the NBN at the moment, and one of the things that keeps popping up is the issue of data capacity and transfer, latency and throughput. Having worked with video for years, I’m always reminded that uncompressed video data transfer is still faster by the post or sneakernet.

Cory Doctorow has a great breakdown of the relative data issues:

over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn’t an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours.

I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.