The Internet vs a cycler

I’ve been reading Programming Pearlsfor some time now. It’s a great book, the kind of book that makes you realize what programming really is about.

Among the exercises behind Column 6 in it, there was this strange problem: “At what distances can a courier on a bicycle with a reel of magnetic tape be a more rapid carrier of information than a telephone line that transmits 56,000 bits per second? Than a 1200-bps line?”

The thought that a bicycle can be faster than an electronic communication line seems ridiculous indeed, but it turns out it’s not difficult. For the sake of modernity, let’s replace the ‘magnetic tape’ with a hard disk. 1TB disks are common enough these days that I’ll use that for the calculations.

Now, let’s calculate the time taken for transmitting ‘g’ Gigabytes of data using both the bicycle method and an Internet line, between two places which are ‘d’ kilometres apart. In the bicycle method, we have two kinds of ‘time’s to consider: the time taken to transfer things to and from the hard disk, and the time taken in the bicycle itself. These days, data transfer rates in hard disks lies around 25MB/s from my experience, so I’ll use that as the transfer rate here. Then, 1 gigabyte will take 1GB/25MB ~= 40 seconds. For g GB, it is 40g seconds. This is for one transfer. Since we do this twice (transferring to the hard disk, and later back from it), it’d be 80g seconds in total. In addition, we have the time taken in the bicycle itself. Assuming a minimal speed of 10kmph by the bicycler, the time taken would be d/10 hours, which in seconds would be 360d. So, the total time is 360d + 80g.

For a 56kbps Internet line, the time taken for transferring the same g gigabytes would be  the upload time + download time. From discussions in the Internet, it appears that upload speeds were “from 1/2 to less of the the download speed”. Of course, this is not ‘authoritative’, but is good enough for our purposes. The download speed here is 7KB/s (since 56kbps = 7KB/s). Let’s take the upper limit and take the upload speed to be half of download i.e. 3.5KB/s. Then, time taken = 1000,000g/3.5 + 1000,000g/7 seconds (since 1GB ~= 1000,000KB) = 3000,000g/7. So we’ve got to solve for d in:

360d + 80g < 3000,000g/7

360d < (3000,000 – 560)g/7

d < 2999440g/2520

d < 1200g (approx.)

If g = 1GB, the bicycle is faster for upto a distance of 1200 km.

If we are to use the 1TB hard disk to its full capacity, g ~= 1000GB. Substituting that,

d < 1,200,000 km

which means that upto an astounding distance of about 1200,000 kilometres (that’s about 750,000 miles), a bicycle with a 1TB hard disk is faster than a 56kbps line for transferring 1TB of data!

Now, 56kbps is one of those old dialup lines – the more common internet connection these days is a broadband connection. For purposes of modernity, let’s now assume a 1Mbps connection, which transfers at a rate of 128KB/s. Again, the upload speed is less. And in this case, it appears that upload speeds of 1/4th of download are most common. Hence, let’s assume an uplink of 128/4 = 32KB/s. Then, the inequality is:

360d + 80g < 1000,000g/32 + 1000,000g/128

360d < 4999920g/128

d < 108g

Again, substituting g = 1,

d < 108 km

For 1024 GB (i.e., 1TB data),

d < 110,000 km

Given that the earth’s circumference itself is just 40,000 km, this means that if you need to transfer 1TB of data to anywhere on earth, you’re better off sending a bicycle courier than sending it through today’s internet connections (of course, there’s the issue of crossing the oceans, which we’ll ignore for simplicity ;) )

Now, the same is not true if you need to transfer only 1GB – as we saw above, a bicycle is faster only upto 108 km. So, for what amount of data is a bicycle faster to anywhere on earth? Let’s do one final calculation.

The maximum distance you’d need to travel on earth is half its circumference (can you see why?). This is 20,000 km. So, let’s make d=20,000 km in the inequality and see what g we get.

360*20,000 < 4999920g/128

g > 184 GB

So, the moral of the story is, even if you have a 1Mbps broadband line, if you need to transfer more than 184 GB of data, you’d achieve better speeds to anywhere on earth by carrying a hard disk on a bicycle than by transferring it through the 1Mbps connection!