I am wondering what the fastest internet connection you can access in the US is?
For a qualifier let’s say that I wanted to transmit a 750 terabyte file from New York to San Francisco. What is the fastest way available to both send and then recieve that same file back from the server that received it? What about from New York to London?
FedEx. 
Weird - an OC-255 line is rated at about twice what the Caltech / CERN folks got. But then, there would be a difference between a switched network and a leased, it’s-only-got-two-ends line.
Also of note is that the Caltech / CERN project is bumping up pretty close to the maximum rate a PC can currently take in data:
All in all, FedEx just might be the easiest way to move fairy-tale large piles of data. For now, at least.
I was going to say that too!
But now that I think about it, how long would it take to even copy that file onto hard drives that you could ship? The largest practical firewire/USB external drives now are around 300 gigs right? That would be 2500 hard drives to hold a 750 terabyte file! External hard drives take a few hours to fill up with data, that would be a lot of work.
I would be stunned if you had a 750TB flat file.
Would it not be something like a database which could be sent in chunks rather than a single stream of data?
Would it not make more sense to parse the file into smaller files and send them concurrently?
You can get up to 10Gbps over about 900m.
That doesn’t answer your question, actually. Sorry.
FedEx? Look between your legs, guys. That’s a fat pipe. Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems:
Information is information, and it’s pretty damned amazing how much info is tied up in the human body.
To be fair, that’s a burst transmission. A cable modem has us all beat in long-term data transmission. Plus, it’s a highly redundant burst, at that: Packet loss is nearly inconsequential, unless you count the possible effects of different sperm cells on the end outcome of the child. I’m not saying that all sperm are the same, or that every sperm is sacred: It’s just that each sperm is subtly different from its brothers.
Or, more elegantly and much, much more profoundly:
“It is raining instructions out there; it’s raining programs; it’s raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading algorithms. That’s not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plainer if it were raining floppy disks.” – Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
I picked the size of the file on purpose. Let’s say it really is that big. The Internet2 thing has potential but the only only problem is that I am not sure if it is available outside of that small test. What can I access now?
as for one that is available the following is about the fastest youc an get, though it will cost you thousands. scroll down and look at OC12. 620 mbps
http://www.broadbandlocators.com/t3.php
If you “have” 750TB, and the condition is that the data needs to be somewhere else and readable in the least time possible, I think you’re looking at shipping a rackmount RAID via FedEx, period. You can buy a 1U RAID-4 (for IDE drives), put 4 300GB drives in it, and be up to 1.2TB. The tallest standard rack out there is a 48U rack, which still only gets you 57.6TB. Build 15 of these and assume that your receiver already has the power supply you need to run off of these drives, and you’re looking at 750TB.
FedEx is just the right way to do it for now.
I don’t think shipping DASD storage devices is a good solution. Or any rack for that matter.
To answer a theoretical, “how fast can FedEx get it there”: I went in the other day at 4:30 PM asking to send an envelope from Delaware to Colorado as quickly as possible. For $49.00 they will deliver it by 8:30AM the next morning.
Having been in Italy for a couple years, I was unduly impressed by this
So you’re basically looking at an eighteen-wheeler loaded with rack storage units. Hmm. SF to NY and back: about two weeks. You’d have to have two eighteen-wheelers to implement RAID-1 over the array as a whole, of course.
You could load the racks in a chartered cargo plane, or course. Then it’d be about a day, door to door.
I wonder what the cost per bandwith unit is?
Naw just use WinZip and shrink it to 3 or 4 kilo bits, the attach it to you google mail. :wally 
My parallel question is how much data is already transferring across the nation, what if they used a Peer to Peer network (like Imesh, Napster, Bearshare) where 10,000 people had a piece of it, and all sent it to 10,000 people, where it was re … (lost for a word, like GWB) assembled…
What is funny is in 20 years, we will laugh at this.
Being at the FedEx hub here in Memphis you can drop a package off at the airport at 11pm and it will be anywhere in the U.S. the next morning by 9am. Not too shabby.
There are special cases made for shipping rack-mount equipment via air. They are used by people who need to perform complex tests at remote locations. They aren’t cheap but they will protect the equipment from damage.
It was mentioned that the 750TB number was picked on purpose…I seem to recall reading (somewhere, probably some sci-fi rag) that if a human body, or the entire human genome, or something like that, were “digitized” (for lack of a better term), it would take approx. 750TB. Does this ring a bell with anyone?
Are you trying to figure out if it would be practical to network-transmit a “digital human?”
Shhhhhhh! It is for my nephew’s class science project and I don’t want that Benny Jenkins to scoop us again this year.