About file transfers

To get a perspective on the ease-of-use that Streamfile gives to point to point file deliveries, we are going to cover some of the options that are out there.

P2P
There are many that use P2P technology to exchange files. Although P2P is usually free and very popular, it does have some downsides:

1. It requires that both sender and receiver are online at the same time
2. Third-party software needs to be installed
3. Specific ports needs to be opened in firewalls between both senders and recievers.

FTP
stands for File Transfer Protocol and is the most popular way to transfer large files today. The FTP standard was officially started on June 16th in 1971.

The original FTP protocol suffers from security issues, such as a majority of all server setups sends account passwords in clear text. Furthermore FTP is a high latency protocol due to the number of commands needed to initiate a transfer. When a file is uploaded to a FTP server the whole file needs to be uploaded first, before any of the data can be downloaded. FTP does not offer any reciepts or notifications when a file is downloaded. Even though most browsers have support for FTP, its recommended to install a 3:rd party FTP application.

Sneakernet
(or Adidasnet) is a term used to describe the transfer of electronic information, especially computer files, by physically carrying removable media such as backup tapes, DVDs, USB flash drives or external hard drives from one computer system to another.

Sneakernets are in use throughout the computer world. Sneakernets may be used when computer networks are prohibitively expensive for the owner to maintain, in high-security environments where manual inspection (for re-classification of information) is necessary, where information needs to be shared between networks with different levels of security clearance, when data transfer is impractical due to bandwidth limitations, when a guest laptop is incompatible with the local network, or simply when two computers are not powered up at the same time or lack the correct interconnecting cabling. Because sneakernets take advantage of physical media, different security measures must be taken into account for the transfer of sensitive information.

For example: Person A requested Person B to send him a DVD (4.7GB) worth of data. Over the Internet the latency for the file request may be milliseconds but at a modest broadband download speed of 50kB/s it may take up to a day to complete the transfer. On the other hand Person B could burn a DVD and deliver it to Person A in an hour. The latency was an hour but the throughput of the transfer is roughly equal to a transfer rate of 1305 kB/s.

RFC 1149
Datagrams over Avian Carriers (RFC 1149) is a humorous internet protocol for the transmission of messages via homing pigeon. Avian carriers can provide high delay, low throughput, and low altitude service, primarily useful in Metropolitan Area Networks. The connection topology is limited to a single point-to-point path for each carrier, used with standard carriers, but many carriers can be used without significant interference with each other, outside of early spring.

References:
Wikipedia.org
IETF.org