[Starlink] It’s the Latency, FCC

[David Lang]

Alexandre Petrescu wrote:

> h++ps://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/17/aws-stops-selling-snowmobile-truck-for-cloud-migrations.html
>> so this is more than just a concept...
>
> Thank you for the example.  It is good to know.  From the URL, it seems 
> as if they did with that truck something that magnetic backup tapes did 
> before.  Last time I checked, magnetic backup tapes still had higher 
> capacity than hard disk drives at a same dimension, but I dont know now.
>
> In a similar vein, there is also a demo of IP-over-avian-carriers RFC 
> (pigeons).  It is just half fun, and useful in some sense.
>
> This aspect of using object things (trucks, planes, pigeons) to transmit 
> data, rather than electromagnetic waves, is also very relevant in a 
> satcom discussion.  They talk about these ballons, cubesats, disksats, 
> sails, and more.  They too might offer higher bandwidths but with huge 
> latencies.  They might be useful for some application, too.

I think the original version was 'never underestimate the bandwidth of a station 
wagon filled with tapes driving down the freeway' :-)

tape may have a higher density, but once you include the fact that tape is more 
fragile when transported, and the time it takes to read/write the data on each 
end, the value of RAID arrays of spinning rust compared to tape is very 
attractive.

David Lang