51–60 of 138 posts
11MBps for 8$ a month... My ISP is ripping me off! In all seriousness, this is amazing. Once again it proves that nobody should underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of harddrives speeding down the highway... or in this case Cubans exchanging Harddrives.
If you have access to a datacenter you're basically hooked into the firehose.
Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind: 1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete" 2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old 3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata Thus: what the fu…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E
It talks about the mechanics, largely it looks like someone in Miami is consistently collecting stuff until they get close to 1TB or a week has passed, then that 1TB is flown out to Havana and it's copied and passed around after that.
It'd also be interesting to try and create a better UI for distribution of Internet content with latencies of up to 1 week.
Thousands of hours of fun on just one disk...
Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind: 1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete" 2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old 3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata Thus: what the fu…
this article should be named as 'The Cuban CDN and the Cuban cloud'
Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind: 1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete" 2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old 3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata Thus: what the fu…
Or you could just have 11 1Mbps connections...
Awesome article! Does anyone have any further information? A few things stick in my mind: 1. FTA: "You'd need to be downloading at over 11Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get the equivalent of El Paquete" 2. The AV update is 4 days old, the offline copy of Revolico is 3 days old 3. The article as a whole implies that El Paquete Semanal is a regularly distributed, ~850GB weekly curated samizdata Thus: what the fu…
"... at 851GB ... 11Mbps 24 hours a day" I'm from Cuba and I can say that weekly package (el paquete) always contains files from previous weeks, so what's real new each week is up to 200 GB, those guy store all that information in a lot of common hard drives and distribute the package just coping from a portable hard drive to another one, that's the "cloud" for Cubans :( this article should be named as 'The Cuban CDN…
Right, thanks! I made the erroneous assumption that the bulk of the data changed weekly (thanks to that "... 851GB ... at 11Mbps 24 hours a day" thing). Keeping the AV updates/some text-heavy-craigslist-alike current is an entirely different proposition.
Here I thought this was a revolutionary high-throughput sneakernet content accretion system possibly operating under the government/telcos collective nose, but as others point out it's probably more like the warez FTPs of the 90s. Here's hoping wider pipes, both technologically and ideologically, come to Cuba soon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact, it's quite probable. Doubt it'll happen in 2016, but bet it will by the end of 2017.
It will be fascinating to see how fast Cuba in a post embargo-lift landscape can build up ip infrastructure, its cool that by year's end 2017 its probably good enough for a Cloudflare PoP. (though imagine being uniquely placed to the USA along with other factors is a huge plus for building that infra).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will disappear. El Paquete Semanal is not at all unlike the combination of sneakernet and shareware CDs that I enjoyed in semi-rural western Canada, during the 80s and early 90s. We were crippled by long-distance fees, and very few FidoNet BBS' were available; IIRC, there was one in my local calling area, and it was hideously expensive. The local community bookstore started by selling shareware discs, in 5.25 and…
Thanks for your input, this is a really interesting parallel. Although, you didn't have to worry about censorship and a repressive government in Canada, you're probably right that it will disappear. Do you remember what kinds of software was available at the bookstore? Was it only media like games/simulations/etc or did they have business/productivity software and operating systems?
I picked up Linux at that same book store, it came on a CD with a book from SAMS publishing called "Using Linux". It was Slackware, iirc, using a 1.x kernel of some kind.