this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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What is the bandwidth of a cargo plane? You fill the hold with data storage disks, fly them to the destination and then read them in.
But shitty round trip time.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
Is there a published date on there somewhere? I didn't see one but I'm curious. It cites an estimate that total internet throughput is 167 terabits per second but I can't imagine it's that low these days.
archive.org suggests that What-If #31 appeared sometime around the 10th of February, 2013. That fits with one of the links in the article which first appeared (again, according to archive.org) in 2008 and ceased to be valid around 2015.
Randall has (or his team has) updated the formatting on the What-If site, but they haven't bothered to fix the links.
explainxkcd.com gives the publication date as 2013‑02‑05.
That's kinda how aws got companies into cloud storage.
A truck that would duplicate a companies disks, then drive to a data center and make the data available on s3 or whatever.
Retired now, tho.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-retires-snowmobile-truck-based-data-transfer-service/