Today’s the day Jeff Geerling makes it to the Washington Post for a decent story about carrier pigeons vs. Ethernet. Very fun to see as both a homelabber and newspaper person.

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    38 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    At certain data volumes and distances, the pigeon is a quicker option for large swaths of rural America, where internet speeds can lag far behind the national average.

    Rural-urban and rich-poor divides in internet quality persist because of uneven investment, according to Alex Kelley, head of broadband consulting at the Center on Rural Innovation.

    The daily inefficiencies that come with slower internet can add up to lagging economic growth or increased unemployment as reliance on the digital economy grows, Kelley says.

    Earlier this year, YouTuber and software developer Jeff Geerling strapped 3 terabytes’ worth of flash drives onto a pigeon.

    (He made sure to wrap them in a plastic bag: “If the bird poops, you don’t want to lose your data.”) The pigeon won against his super-fast gigabit fiber internet.

    In 2016, Amazon launched AWS Snowmobile, a shipping container that can hold up to 100 petabytes of data — that’s 20 billion iPhone photos.


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