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The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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There was an article the other day where like so many TB fit on a disc with a new laser, and really made me think, how much TB on a disc would it take to make our internet look like pigeon mail again?
I mean we need the media quality to utilise it all, but it doesn't yet cos of the cost of storage and portability. But if 5TB fit on a disc, man would the landscape change.
I highly doubt it, fiddling with discs is much less convenient than downloading (or streaming).
There's some places in Africa they send usbs with stuff on pigeons if it's more than a couple gigs cause regular internet is so slow and unreliable it's literally faster and safer.
Olds, Alberta has municipal gigabit Internet because the main engineering firm in town was using couriers to send USB sticks between their two offices. They were considering leaving since the Internet providers weren't willing to build "expensive infrastructure" in a small town, so the municipality took it on.
Now Olds has the cheapest fast Internet pretty much anywhere in the country.
Anyway, point being: it's not just happening in developing countries.
Once unlimited fiber internet comes to somebody’s neighborhood, it seems like we’d need a new use case to make sneakernet / pigeonverse worth it for consumer use. People download 100+GB games every day without a second thought.
Maybe there are some cases where it would be nice to carry a ton of data physically with you, but you can already fit a lot of data in a small portable hard drive.
Certain scientific applications require really large amounts of raw data, collected from sensors and the like. Radio telescopes, for example, require each sensor to send petabytes of data to a central place to be analyzed. For example, the Event Horizon telescope has sensors all over the world, and hard drives of the recorded data get sent to be analyzed in the United States and Germany.
For residential applications, though, yeah. There currently isn't much of a use case for sneakernet where you can get terabytes of data with latency above a few days.