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My employer's Internet connection is extremely slow. It's a $6,000 a month, 9 Mb, bonded T1, shared by over 150 users. It's not untypical to see regular file transfer speeds of 20-100 KBps. And that was after I convinced upper management to upgrade - before it was $3,000 a month for 3Mb. There are no other carriers in the area with better prices or speeds.
When I need to download a large file (which is frequently), I drive 40 miles back home, use my $60 a month 20 Mb FiOS connection, download the file in ten minutes, and drive back in less time than it would take me to just download the file at work (this is efficient for files greater than 500 megabytes, depending on the congestion of the network).
After more than a year doing this, and more and more frequent downloads, I'm at my wits' end.
I am seriously contemplating raising carrier pigeons to fly back and forth between my home and office to transfer the files. Assuming a pigeon is carrying a 16 GB MicroSD card and can fly at a speed of about 50 miles per hour, the equivalent throughput for file transfer using trained pigeon would be about 48 Mbps. Given the price of gas where I live and wear and tear on the car, that would probably be the cheapest option too.
What are some good, viable, alternative methods of transferring large files, rather than using my employer's Internet connection?
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+1 for pigeons. IPoAC is the way to go.
– Mechanical snail – 2011-08-03T20:14:42.70322More seriously, $6000?! Are you in some remote location? I'm surprised that that's really the only ISP in your area. – Mechanical snail – 2011-08-03T20:16:58.363
4@Mechanical snail - Yeah, it's crazy. The whole area where my employer is used to be owned by Boeing & the US military. When they consolidated their property (i.e. moved out of some buildings), it developed into a manufacturing and business district. I can only imagine that it costs so much because the ISPs business rates in this area are based on the big bucks that Boeing and the military were able to afford - or something like that. – Kyle Lowry – 2011-08-03T20:20:23.883
1does sound like you have a net policy issue, are all these people using the net for work ? Sounds like youd get good milage out of a cheapo home style connection just for downloading files for all of $30 a month. – Sirex – 2011-08-03T21:02:02.330
10Have you spoken to your software vendor about getting the latest builds shipped to you overnight on a flash drive? A lot of vendors and resellers are prepared to make special arrangements, you'll probably get billed for it but dependant on distance and build frequency you may well find it comparable to your current costs. – Robb – 2011-08-03T22:22:15.797
1@Robb - Unfortunately (for more than one reason) our vendor is in India. It's too far and too expensive to ship builds. – Kyle Lowry – 2011-08-03T22:44:10.240
2@Kyle: The problem is on your vendor's side. Two recommendations come to mind. The first is that there should be daily penalties for late delivery. You incur a cost because of them, that should be born by them. Second, even if shipping from India isn't feasible, having all but the last mile of shipment is doable. They could forward the build to a local relay of some sort (encrypted if need be), that then delivers to your firm. Even FedEx/Kinko's comes to mind as a possibility. Routinely losing staff time due to a vendor should be unacceptable. – Iterator – 2011-08-04T00:14:38.553
74Your speed estimate is for African or European pigeons? – Diadistis – 2011-08-04T00:15:49.397
@Iterator - I agree. But I'm not quite high enough on the totem pole to insist on things like late fees or penalties. And, naturally, there are politics involved. – Kyle Lowry – 2011-08-04T00:50:51.923
1Okay, then why not time-shift on/near their release day? Simply stagger your arrival time relative to others, and someone will be able to bring the download in to work. – Iterator – 2011-08-04T01:46:30.067
1Also, are you compressing with the best compression? If you're transmitting as plaintext that's terrible. Look at something like the ZPAQ compressor or at least a high level for bzip2. Having a staging area elsewhere, such as Amazon's EC2, can let you get good BW and do a diff for to find just the stuff that needs to be compressed and relayed. – Iterator – 2011-08-04T01:49:36.117
7Have your employer pay for your home internet, work from home. What can be better? :-) If you're driving home very often, maybe you should just stay at home and drive to work when you're physically needed there? – vtest – 2011-08-04T05:47:22.660
I use wireless tethering available in my mobile phone. If you leave in California you should be able to use that also. – Rudy – 2011-08-04T07:01:47.573
3I can't post an answer yet, as I just linked my StackExchange account to superuser, hence will provide a suggestion and a possible answer as a comment.
Why not try getting the difference (diff) between the original file and the new deployment as a patch , downloading it and applying it over a file you already have instead of downloading the entire build all the time? – bhagyas – 2011-08-04T07:55:00.787
2How about Bulletin Board System using a program such as Hyper Terminal, a modem and a phone line? – LEMUEL ADANE – 2011-08-04T08:31:08.137
17You can easily parallelize pigeons without line installation costs! – moala – 2011-08-04T09:09:40.817
5I hope you start the download remotely on your home machine before you drive 40 miles back home. – db42 – 2011-08-04T11:13:39.433
5"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. – Matt Molnar – 2011-08-04T17:35:31.170
2I was worried about security. Will you use hawks to protect the data transfer? – woliveirajr – 2011-08-04T18:07:05.727
9It's worth noting that the company is now reliant on your personal internet connection and frequent drive out of the office. What it you left or were hit by the proverbial bus and your replacement wasn't prepared to do this? Or do they have to include 'willing to drive a lot' as part of the job description. As such your company has a financial incentive to try and help you solve this problem – Kris C – 2011-08-04T18:45:59.280
1Also, could you batch up downloads and bring them into work the next day, or are they all 'must have now' kind of things? If so, can the cost of 'must have now' (and cost of 'not having now') be estimated? This can be used in any negotiations... – Kris C – 2011-08-04T18:48:09.917
courier the material. that would be far cheap than your internet connection – xorpower – 2011-08-05T10:26:49.980
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See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
– Christopher Bottoms – 2011-08-05T19:27:31.1873Simply hit the fire alarm. Everyone will exit the building leaving the internet connection free of users. You can then complete you download without any delay. – Rincewind42 – 2011-08-07T15:30:23.680
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There's always the RFC-documented Avian Carrier standards, which are documented in RFC 1149 about IP datagram transmissions ( http://rfc1149.openrfc.org/ ) and RFC 2549 about IP-over-Avian-Carriers with QoS ( http://rfc2549.openrfc.org/ ). ;-P
– Randolf Richardson – 2011-08-22T00:26:27.3932Send link of this page to your boss – echolab – 2012-06-14T11:14:58.103