Fed up with Australian internet speeds that trail those in most of the developed world, Morgan Jaffit turned to a more reliable method of data transfer: the postal system.
Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have downloaded Hand of Fate, an action video game made by his studio in Brisbane, Defiant Development. But when Defiant worked with an audio designer in Melbourne, more than 1,000 miles away, Mr. Jaffit knew it would be quicker to send a hard drive by road than to upload the files, which could take several days.
"It's really the big file sizes that kill us," said Mr. Jaffit, the company's co-founder and creative director. "When we release an update and there's a small bug, that can kill us by three or four days."
Australia, a wealthy nation with a widely envied quality of life, lags in one essential area of modern life: its internet speed. Eight years after the country began an unprecedented broadband modernization effort that will cost at least 49 billion Australian dollars, or $36 billion, its average internet speed lags that of the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan and South Korea. In the most recent ranking of internet speeds by Akamai, a networking company, Australia came in at an embarrassing No. 51, trailing developing economies like Thailand and Kenya.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday May 13 2017, @11:00PM (1 child)
> "When we release an update and there's a small bug, that can kill us by three or four days."
In situations like that, rsync can be handy. Unsurprisingly, it was invented by Australians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14 2017, @01:34AM
Was wondering the same thing: What size was this HDD? On AArnet transferring data from Sydney (10gbit) to Canberra takes a few days. 8TB usually takes 2.5 days depending on the number of parallel transfers.
Rsync is the tool if choice for sure! FYI first pass can be sped up with Filezilla.