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."

Comments

Netflix

[The Good Reverend]

Remember also the story posted last year - Snail Mail Still Winning The Bandwidth War, where the discussion focused on Netflix.

I think it's an interesting way to compare the two, but it's ultimately pointless. I can carry my 60 gig HD across the room (or the house) in much faster time than I can send all that data over my home network, and that's likely going to be true as both transfer rates and storage capacity increase with time. Pigeons are novel, of course, but as mentioned earlier, packet loss is a bitch.

Faster than the internet?

[Trbmxfz]

Nick Andreef's pigeons are faster than the internet, but no match for falcons.

Faster than the internet? Let's see:

- The picture shows a Memory Stick. That's at most 1GB (the blue MS like the one on the picture are at most 256MB, but let's be generous),

- the pigeons go at 65 kph,

- they have to travel over 20 km.

That's 20km/65kph = 1107 seconds. Which converts to slightly less than 942 KBps. Now, I don't know what kind of ISPs they have in New Zealand, but 1MBps shouldn't be that hard to achieve! Even using the announced 3GB capacity of a single bird, that's just 3MBps.

Maybe if they had used one of those wireless networks they wouldn't need to feed pigeons (and clean up after them)? Even the falcons go at a mere 10MBps bandwidth!

Re:Faster than the internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one line. Just like broadband is made of several smaller lines with individual limits, this pigeon network is made of several pigeons which can EACH carry a packet.
It even mentions a fleet of 50 pigeons in the article. So if they only had 256MB memory sticks, like the one in the picture, that would be 3.2 GB.
Again, if you read the article rather than skimmed, it mentioned that the flight time was six minues (600 seconds) That would be equal to about 5.3 MBps. Good luck getting that kind of transfer rate for as much as those pigeons cost them.

Re:Faster than the internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except fot the fact that they might use just more than one pigeon. I think they said a network of 50, and 0.942 x 50 =47.1 MBbs

Re:Still true

[halo8]

I dont..

i got a friend that lives a 1/2 hour away.. hour round trip.. we like to exchange warez files.. CD's ISO's 750-1.4Gb. FTP over cable or DSL.. dosent beat me in my car