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Pigeons Faster than Internet
An anonymous reader writes "The topic of pigeons and modern technology has come up a number of times now. For instance, we have the Google pigeon rank method, and there have been several April fools hoaxes like this previous story and RFC 2549. Now the Waikato Times is reporting in this story about how pigeons are being used to transfer large amounts of data in a short amount of time. The pigeons have proven to be faster and more relieable than electronic means. However, as you will see from the story there is still the occasional packet loss. This is definitely a case of high bandwidth wireless networking."
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Traditionally the capital B is used to refer to Bytes and a lower case b is for bits... I don't know of any 1MBps (8 Mbps) ISP that is cheap outside of Korea... I have a 2 Mbps cable modem in Austin, Texas from road runner...
Wireless (802.11) links over 20km get a lot of attention on Slashdot but are very uncommon, and they might be persistent connections but they are much slower than 11 mbps.
And if you meant microwave antenna... damn those are super expensive and need perfect line of sight.... The pigeon idea is both novel and apparently, when no falcons are around, also practical.
I don't know of any 1MBps (8 Mbps) ISP that is cheap outside of Korea...
Japan maybe? But indeed, I goofed; buying several megabit links may not be cheap in most countries (and is apparently impractical in the case explained in the article).
Wireless (802.11) links over 20km get a lot of attention on Slashdot but are very uncommon
What? Are you implying that what is said on Slashdot doesn't always closely reflect reality? Man, I'm disappointed!
Also, assuming fifty falcons, carrying three one-gig memory sticks each, we get up to a whopping 4 gigabits per second. I don't know if I'd let birds handle that many memory cards (they are expensive), though.
And don't get me started on the ping times, as others have mentioned already.
So I guess until someone straps a jetpack on their back and power-dives, no human will ever experience it...
Michel fournier is planning to attempt to skydive from 130,000 feet and reach supersonic speeds (1200 to 1600 kmph / 750 to 1000 mph).
Nick Piantanida tried and failed to do that in 1965. And all these are unpowered skydives.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Maybe it's a first for digital images, but its been done for years by rafting companies_ in_the_news /news.cgi?rec_id=21
http://www.interbug.com/pigeon/pigeons
and no doubt by various spy groups and such.