Need faster broadband? Try posting your data via Amazon's big box

Company's Snowball hardware lets developers use postal service to get higher bandwidth than their broadband service

Amazon has come up with a new system for getting huge amounts of data from your computers to theirs: send it by post. As computer science pioneer Andy Tanenbaum wrote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

The company's new Snowball hardware is aimed at developers who use Amazon Web Services, the increasingly-ubiquitous internet backend to websites as varied as Netflix and Ocado.