Traffic jams, rail disruptions, waiting around in airport lounges, imagine if data had to shuffle around the internet like us mere mortals do the globe, the world would not be as connected as it is today.
Luckily the information superhighway is a lot more efficient at moving data than the best-developed physical modes of transport are at getting humans around. That’s one point for the machines.
Fast file transfer
All data transfers work on the principle of packets. Data travels across the internet in packets carrying a maximum of 1,500 bytes. These packets are wrapped with a header and footer, which tell computers what kind of data is in the packet, how it fits together with other data, where the data came from and the data’s final destination.
What makes the file transfer so robust and fast is that different packets from the same data transfer do not have to follow the same path. So packets can spread out and travel from one machine to another until they reach their destination, where they are assembled like a puzzle to recreate their original form.
What’s more, if a packet does not make it to the destination, the machine receiving the data can determine which packet is missing by referencing the packets that did arrive. A message can then be sent to the sending machine to send the data again, all within a matter of milliseconds.
Data transfer rate
The speed with which data can be transmitted from one device to another depends on the bandwidth of a given path. In general, the greater the bandwidth of a given path, the higher the data transfer rate.
Taking average Ethernet local area network speeds of 10 megabits per second it would take roughly one hour 10 minutes to get a full DVD, usually 4.7 gigabytes, from one computer to another. That transfer time can be slashed to as short as 4 minutes 20 seconds to anywhere in the world when you start looking at fibre optic connection speeds like 155.52 megabits per second.
Faster than…
It would take the world’s longest commercial flight 15 hours and 25 minutes to get the same DVD from Sydney, Australia, to Dallas, Texas, USA, covering a whopping 8,578 miles.
So you could spend the trip watching a Martin Scorsese omnibus of The Wolf of Wall Street (179 min), Casino (178 min), The Aviator (170 min), Gangs of New York (167 min), The Departed (151 min) and half of Goodfellas (146 min) before landing.
Not to mention the 7 days 20 hours 25 minutes it would take the world’s longest train journey to get the DVD from Moscow, Russia to Pyongyang, North Korea, covering 6,346 miles.
Or the record-breaking 11 days, 17 hours and 22 minutes it would take to drive your DVD from the southernmost point of South America in Ushuaia, Argentina to the northernmost point of North America, at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, USA on the world’s longest drivable road the Pan-American Highway, covering a distance of 30,000 miles.
Author: Maytech offers fast local and international file transfer of any data size allowing you and your organisation to meet workflow deadlines. To find out more visit their site.
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