A Durban [South Africa] IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom. Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.
Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm’s slow internet speeds.
The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL. He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.
[…]
Winston took off from Unlimited IT’s call centre in the town of Howick to deliver the memory stick to the firm’s office in Durban. According to Winston’s website there were strict rules in place to ensure he had no unfair advantage. They included “no cats allowed” and “birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within”.
[…]
Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.
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Not unlike the contest on Jay Leno pitting kids texting against ham operators sending morse code. Of course, the code operators were much faster. However, morse code is equally dangerous to attempt while driving.
“Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter”
i bet they do so, slowly…
😛
Nice piece of news you found there Dave!
More details regarding IP over Avian Carriers can be found here.
A European pigeon would have been faster
😉
#4. “A European pigeon would have been faster”, and have stopped for a two hour lunch break.
Some digital movies get to the theaters via a
hard drive in the mail or FedEx. It’s the fastest
way to get massive amounts of data there.
I think the Postal Service delivering a BluRay Disc with 25 gigs for the price of a few stamps beats all of our “Broadband” providers !!! Has always been so since 300 Baud Dial up to the DSL Broadband era. Fiber could change that, but most don’t have that yet …
The bird was also able to replicate the IT company’s customer service as it flew over some cars.
Easy upgrade: replace the 4GB with a 16GB stick, instant 4x increase.
Even in internet saturated countries, It’d pretty rare to find people who could UPLOAD 4Gb within 2 hours using the commonly available internet services.
Download, sure, but upload speeds are pretty much always at a tiny proportion of the download speeds we all get.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with TK-50 tapes.
One of the larger external hard drives shipped on overnight delivery is going to beat the crap out of my DSL especially as an upload.
# 1 Faxon,
“However, morse code is equally dangerous to attempt while driving.”
I beg to differ. You don’t have to look at the key board / or scroll thru menus. The interface is so ridiculously simple and intuitive it make Steve Jobs blush and you don’t have to avert your eyes from the road. You just need one hand or one foot available.
Ok, back to the regularly scheduled topic.
What do you call a hungry hawk, dropped bits and retransmit until it gets thru rain or shine, day or night.
# 2 AdmFubar said, “Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter”
Admiral: Wanna go into business with me? I’m thinking of introducing internet porn to South Africa. Sounds like they’re ready for it.
Wow, that’s even slower than my cheap ADSL! I calculate that after two hours, I could have sent five percent of 4GB! Wo0t!
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No link to the original story? Tsk tsk.
[Oops! Fixed. — UD]