> You've done something wrong if you have a single gigabyte-sized CATIA
> file. I expect what they had was a large assembly (consisting of a large
> number of much smaller CATIA files) and were attempting to send the
> entire set of files every day. I've worked somewhere before that did
> that between UK and Japan, but the total assemblies were only <20MB so
> it worked ok (apart from the version control problems...).

Ok fine, I should have written "gygabytes of CATIA files".   It's been 
20 years since I played with CATIA, so my knowledge of the file 
structure is somewhat shady.

The design of this setup had the Indians accessing the files (on servers 
that were in Canada), verifiy that they conformed to various standards, 
flag non-conformities for review, and then move to the next file.

A 20MB file is 16M bits.  At 1500bits per packet, it means ~ 110,000 
packets.  If the round trip takes 200-400ms per packet, then it takes 
20,000 seconds, or more than 6 hrs, ignoring link congestion and other 
technicalities, for someone to open the file from India.

Which meant that an Indian could only review 2, or maybe 3 files per 
day, making this outsourcing deal completely worthless as the 
productivity of an Indian worker paid $15/day was worse than that of a 
Canadian intern paid $15/hr.

that why I said that "The Cloud" may help one manager work on his 
monthly report while on the train back home in the evening, and 
technically allows you to access your files from anywhere, but it 
doesn't solve everyone's problem.

>
> However, lots and lots companies work on much larger assemblies across
> multiple sites (eg car and plane manufacturers), so this problem has
> been solved already.

I know that.  For instance, the suspension components of the Ferrari F1 
cars is (used to be?) designed in my building in Montreal, and they had 
no issues with being on a different continent than the rest of the 
Scuderia staff.


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