Is that still true? With the size of the bases, I had assumed the network connection would be significantly more robust and/or higher bandwidth. How does the Icecube project or similar scientific experiments work? Or is it all still station wagons full of tapes?
If by "station wagon" you mean LC-130 ;) IceCube switched from tapes to hard drives I think in 2015 or 16.
In 2014 we spent a lot of time fiddling with tapes and drives... At that point, all the data was recorded to tape and flown North in the summer. Additionally, software at Pole filtered out the more interesting events to upload over satellite within hours. I assume it's still basically the same.
I'm curious about whether the temperature at the pole presents any difficulty for handling tapes (and hard drives). How easy is it to keep media within a safe temperature window in situ, and during transport in/out?
Directly, the temperature isn't as big an issue for operating tapes/drives/computers, since they are inside temperature-controlled buildings. There are indirect problems though; the incredibly low relative humidity that results from heating outside air - that dryness leads to problems with static. Various solutions were tried to keep the tapes humidified, but in the end I think everyone was relieved to switch to hard drives :). South Pole is also fairly high elevation, which combined with the low humidity makes air cooling work a lot less well than it might in other places - the air just doesn't have as much heat capacity as in more moderate environments.
As far as transport, it's about a km (in winter, typically a walk) from the main station to the "dark sector" where the CMB telescopes and IceCube Lab are. As another comment points out, there are cables between the main station and the dark sector so typically data flows through them. When you do need to move equipment, it's usually not too big of a deal to carry it inside a parka or something if it's smallish, or arrange a vehicle for bigger items.
Things like cables can be a bit of a learning experience; a friend hand carried a PVC-insulated monitor(?) cable outside, coiled up, then promptly tried to uncoil it and found that PVC gets quite brittle at low temperatures...
