The
SETI@Home project produces about 35
Gigabytes of data a day. While this does not sound like
that much to someone with a nice connection (a
T1 is 1.544 Megabits/second - or about 0.2 Megabytes/second), even on a T1 this data would take 2 days to transmit a single day's worth of data. However, The
Arecibo telescope's (in
Puerto Rico) bandwidth is more similar to that of
DSL connection or a
dialup which is used for much less bandwidth hungry projects.
Instead, these tapes are sent on 35 Gigabyte DLT tapes are sent out by postal mail to Berkeley.
While in 1981 a station wagon filled with QIC tapes was a fair bit - consider today the bandwidth of a 747 filled with DVD-ROMs. One thing to consider though - the length of time it takes to read the data from the media.
Make certain you have a large timeout on any packets sent via station wagon.