《那些古怪又让人忧心的问题》第90期:联邦快递VS互联网(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.

思科预计互联网流量将以每年29％的速度递增，在这个条件下互联网流量将于2040年达到联邦快递的运输能力。当然了，到那个时候硬盘上可以放得下的数据也变多了。实际上，唯一能达到联邦快递能力的方式就是使数据传输速率增速远超数据储存速率。坦白说，这看上去有些不现实，因为传输和存储是相辅相成的——从某个地方来的数据总要到另一个地方去——但我们无法准确预计将来的使用情况是否还是如此。

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.

虽然联邦快递在将来的几十年内还是能保持优势，但这不意味着我们没法制造出能够击败他们的新型连接方式。现在已经有每秒能够处理超过1PB的光纤束出现了，只要200根这样的光纤就能让联邦快递趴下。

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.

如果你足够有钱，雇用美国整个货运行业来为你运送SD卡，那么传输速率将达到每秒500EB（相当于0.5ZB）。要想在数字世界达到这个速率，你需要50万根上述的千万亿位光纤。

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.

所以结论是，如果只考虑原始带宽的话，互联网可能将永远没法击败“步行网”。不过，使用这种近乎无限的带宽的代价是，打游戏时会“享受”8000万毫秒的延迟。