WHILE I REST UP, A FACTOID: Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems. [The following found, of course, on the Internet.]
The human genome is about 3,120,000,000 base pairs long, so half of that is in each spermatozoa -- 1,560,000,000 base pairs . Each side of these base pairs can either be an adenine -thymine or a guanine -cytosine bond, and they can be aligned either direction, so there are four choices. Four possibilities for a value means it can be fully represented with two bits; 00 = guanine, 01 = cytosine, and so forth.
The figures that I've read state the number of sperm in a human ejaculation to be anywhere from 50 to 500 million. I'm going to go with the number 200,000,000 sperm cells , but if anyone knows differently, please tell me.
Putting these together, the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*10^ 9* 2 bits * 2.00*10^ 8, which comes out to be 6.24*10 ^17 bits. That's about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds , you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s . In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet ) can move .005 tb/s. Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th of that .
If you consider signal to noise , though, the figures come out much differently. If only the single sperm cell that fertilizes the egg counts as signal , you get (1.560*10^ 9* 2 bits) / 5 s = 6.24*10^ 8bits/s, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 78 Mb/s . Still a great deal more bandwidth than your average cable modem , but not nearly the 5,000,000 Mb/s of the OC-96 .
http://www.WilliamGibsonBooks.com/archive/2003_04_01_archive.asp