IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service (1999)

(rfc-editor.org)

54 points | by mig4ng 8 hours ago ago

23 comments

  • jonathanlydall 5 hours ago ago

    In 2009 when South African IT communication was essentially only permitted through a single entity, as a publicity stunt a small ISP did an implementation of this:

    https://pigeonrace2009.co.za/

    As I recall at the time, the best consumer speeds available were 512kbps with a 3GB per month cap at today’s cost of about 45USD.

    The worst part (especially as a WoW player) is that QoS was applied giving priority to ports 80, 443, 110 and 25. This resulted in all other ports having terrible latency, probably added 150ms on top of the unavoidable (due to speed of light) 190ms to get to European servers.

    Fortunately today the situation is much better, there are numerous FNO companies and even more numerous ISPs for each.

    I pay about 45 USD for an uncapped 100Mbps connection.

    • Doohickey-d 3 hours ago ago

      It's an interesting form of spam how theres a link for an online gambling site just inline in the text.

  • aleken an hour ago ago

    Bergen Linux User Group doing it: https://blug.linux.no/project/rfc1149/

  • breppp 5 hours ago ago

    Reminds me of that AWS hard drive truck thing where your data is sent with quite the latency

    • esafak 4 hours ago ago

      Echoing Andrew Tanenbaum's famous quip, Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

      • EvanAnderson 2 hours ago ago

        Back in the late 90s I delivered a couple of LTO drives and a bunch of tapes to a Customer in my car (not a station wagon, sadly). As I drove I thought "drive faster to decrease the latency!"

        (The car was a Geo Metro and my co-workers described it as not much bigger than one of the backup tapes-- one of them likening it to some kind of interchangeable backup module itself.)

      • Sharlin 3 hours ago ago

        It’s a great way to demonstrate the difference between bandwidth and latency.

    • dredmorbius 5 hours ago ago

      Alas, Snowmobile has been retired:

      <https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/amazon_snowmobile_del...> (2024).

    • ale42 4 hours ago ago
  • tmountain 44 minutes ago ago

    Fun read from simpler times.

  • iso1631 7 hours ago ago

    > Carriers in the queue too long may leave log entries

    > Avian Carriers MAY eat the NATs.

    There's always something I've not spotted / forgotten before with these

  • 71bw 6 hours ago ago

    > One major benefit to using Avian Carriers is that this is the only networking technology that earns frequent flyer miles, plus the Concorde and First classes of service earn 50% bonus miles per packet.

    :D

  • block_dagger 6 hours ago ago

    Bird Internet?

  • nurettin 5 hours ago ago

    Horse heads have also been used historically to send messages of a certain nature.

    • dredmorbius 5 hours ago ago

      With guaranteed receipt. Or at least, they cannot be refused.

  • theginger 7 hours ago ago

    Disappointed there still isn't a protocol for sending messages in a bottle.

  • mapt 7 hours ago ago

    Send a raven to Pyongyang.

    • noumenon1111 3 hours ago ago

      Objective unclear; we sent a writing desk instead thinking, surely Poe could still write on this...

    • mghackerlady 5 hours ago ago

      or you can just like, email them. Their overseas news agencies have email addresses