Jonathan Schwartz of SUN has an interesting back-of-the-envelope calculation for how long it will take to move a petabyte of data from Sanfrancisco to Hong Kong over the Internet. He estimates 507 years at 1/2 MB/sec connection speeds. So it is easier to send it by sailboat he reckons!
In my own experience, we sent a box of indexed blog data tapes from US west-coast to east-coast by overnight shipping rather than over the Internet’s pipes, which would have taken a week at a minimum.
