《那些古怪又讓人憂心的問題》第90期:聯邦快遞VS互聯網(2)

Cisco estimates Internet traffic is growingat about 29 percent annually. At that rate, we'll hit the FedEx point in course, the amount of data we can fit on a drive will have gone up by then,too. The only way to actually reach the FedEx point is if transfer rates growmuch faster than storage rates. In an intuitive sense, this seems unlikely,since storage and transfer are fundamentally linked-all that data is comingfrom somewhere and going somewhere-but there's no way to predict usage patternsfor sure.

思科預計互聯網流量將以每年29％的速度遞增，在這個條件下互聯網流量將於2040年達到聯邦快遞的運輸能力。當然了，到那個時候硬盤上可以放得下的數據也變多了。實際上，唯一能達到聯邦快遞能力的方式就是使數據傳輸速率增速遠超數據儲存速率。坦白說，這看上去有些不現實，因爲傳輸和存儲是相輔相成的——從某個地方來的數據總要到另一個地方去——但我們無法準確預計將來的使用情況是否還是如此。

While FedEx is big enough to keep up withthe next few decades of actual usage, there's no technological reason we can'tbuild a connection that beats them on bandwidth. There are experimental fiberclusters that can handle over a petabit per second. A cluster of 200 of thosewould beat FedEx.

雖然聯邦快遞在將來的幾十年內還是能保持優勢，但這不意味着我們沒法制造出能夠擊敗他們的新型連接方式。現在已經有每秒能夠處理超過1PB的光纖束出現了，只要200根這樣的光纖就能讓聯邦快遞趴下。

If you recruited the entire US freightindustry to move SD cards for you, the throughput would be on the order of 500exabits-half a zettabit-per second. To match that transfer rate digitally,you'd need to take half a million of those petabit cables.

如果你足夠有錢，僱用美國整個貨運行業來爲你運送SD卡，那麼傳輸速率將達到每秒500EB（相當於0.5ZB）。要想在數字世界達到這個速率，你需要50萬根上述的千萬億位光纖。

So the bottom line is that for rawbandwidth of FedEx, the Internet will probably never beat SneakerNet. However,the virtually infinite bandwidth of a FedEx-based Internet would come at thecost of 80,000,000-millisecond ping times.

所以結論是，如果只考慮原始帶寬的話，互聯網可能將永遠沒法擊敗“步行網”。不過，使用這種近乎無限的帶寬的代價是，打遊戲時會“享受”8000萬毫秒的延遲。