This reminds me of something I read once, where they were measuring bandwidth of FedExing a bunch of big hard drives across the country. A kind of sneakernet but with quite different assumptions. It would make sense in some cases, I expect; for packet loss, you send one set of drives via FedEx and one by UPS.
I used to work at Aspera (before they were acquired by IBM ... sad to see they no longer have their own website) and our main competition at the time was physical transport of hard drives.
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