Interweb question: Is it really a series of tubes?
 

Okay, seriously, my question is whether there is a fast and effective way to transfer gigabytes of data via the Internet? I thought about an FTP server and I think that would work. The amount of data would be about 5 gigs. Is there a safe, secure, private, and free way to do this transfer?

Mailing a DVD with the data on it is trying to be avoided but can be done if the high tech way doesn't work.

Thanks for any advice.

Try Trillian with imsecure. Not sure what kind of speeds you'll get with the aim/msn/yahoo servers.

My calculations could be off, but since my current upload speed is 560kbps, it would take ~2.6 hours to upload 5GB through my Cox broadband account. Now if you had Verizon's FIOS with 2mbps upload speeds. you could upload 5GB in ~43 minutes. So I think it's really dependent on your connection and upload speeds.

Depends on what you mean by fast. Certainly faster than snail mail if you have a decent upload speed. Mine tops out at about 40 KB/s on my cable.

GoDaddy.com has an OnlineFileFolder product which you could use. I think it's about $20 for 10 GB (or is it 20 GB?).

XDrive.com is another one. I think you get a discount if you have an AOL account.

FTP can be a pain because of dropped connections but some FTP Servers and Clients support reconnect.

Another decent service but not for this purpose is Carbonite.com which can keep an offsite backup of your documents (IIRC, it's about $40 a year).

what you are missing in the equation is distance, latency, etc... If you compress the file also that could play into the speed. Typically, I just FTP stuff.

VZ has their FIOS packages cranked all the way up to 50mbps down/10mbps up in some markets. At spec, that's an 8 min. upload of that 5GB file.