Fastest Way to Send a Terabyte Overnight?

Jonathan Schwartz, on his blog writes that the fastest way to send a Petabyte of data across the world is not via your broadband link, but by boat.  This is one of my favorite IT calculations because a lot of people are surprised by the result (a litmus test for of sorts).  A petabyte is so big that even with a 100Mbps line it would take a few years to send it.

I like the Terabyte version of the same calculation that I heard from Jim Gray.  What's the fastest way to send a Terabyte of data overnight?  With a 100Mbps line, it's takes 22 hours.  So the fastest way is by Fedex.  That's why I heard that Google, in some cases, ships an entire data center to certain parts of the world where bandwidths are not even 100Mbps.  That's the fastest way they can update their index.

Comments

[aj]

a classic...i heard it before