Don Singleton: Faster Data Transfer

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Faster Data Transfer

Broadband Slower than Pigeons;
Pigeons Slower than Snails

Ami Ben-Bassat reported On Friday, March 12, 2004, a group of several dozen Internet addicts from Israel and abroad, gathered in the large grass field of the OHALO Center near the Sea of Galilee. The purpose of the gathering was to try and improve Wi-Fly - pigeon-empowered wireless internet and to confront this technology against ADSL. The participants sent 3 homing pigeons to 100 km distance, each carrying 20-22 tiny memory cards containing 1.3 GB, amounting in total of 4 GB of data.

Calculating the bandwidth by dividing the amount of data by the flying time of the last pigeon, show that the bandwidth achieved by the pigeons was significantly larger that that available through commercially available ADSL broadband Internet connections: about 2.27 Mbps (Mega bit per second) as compared to 0.75 – 1.5 Mbps.

Ami Ben-Bassat reported The system called SNAP (SNAil-based data transfer Protocol), uses biological carriers, and, for the first time, taking advantages of the unique merits of the wheel for data transfer.

System architecture: the system is constructed of a back end - a carriage, Ben-Hur movie style, which is made of a yoke made of light Balsa, and outfitted with two huge wheels - 2 DVD wheels, 4.7 Giga each. The front end, to which the carriage is harnessed consist of a Giant snail (Achatina fulica), known also as Giant African Snail.

Results: Calculations that were conducted after the experiment, explicitly proved that in spite of the relatively, very slow, speed of the biological carriers, the Snap system succeeded in transferring data faster than any other conventional technologies, existing today.