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Pigeons' Bandwidth Advantage Quantified
An anonymous reader submits "A well documented test took
place in the north of Israel, in presence of several dozen Internet geeks and
experts. During the test, 3 homing pigeons carried 4 GB (gigabytes) for 100 km
distance, achieving, what apparently looks as pigeons' world record in data
transfer to a given distance. Bandwidth achieved by the pigeons was 2.27
Mbps...Transferring a similar volume of information through a common uplink of
ADSL line would have taken no less than 96 hours..."
So essentially, we should unplug all the cables and just get a bunch of shithawks?
the DSL doesn't shit on my car.
2.27 Mbps = 0.28375 MBps
4 GB / 0.28375 MBps = 14097 secs
14097 secs = 3h 54Mins
100km / 3h 54Mins = 25.53 km/h
25.53 km/h = 15.86 mph
Not bad for laden little pigeons
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
the response time for packet loss is prohibitive... may as well get satellite
12 gauge shotgun i'm applying for the patent right now
vodka, straight up, thank you!
There will be at least ten comments that say (even though it's a pigeon and not a swallow): "Was it African, or European?"
barzelay.net
the relevant rfc
To get a RAID on their backs....
Fill up a cargo jet with full up hard drives and I'd bet you get really good bandwidth.
It's a truism within the London-based Post-production industry (pretty much all located within a square mile of Soho, central London) that the bandwidth of a bunch of RAID arrays in a transit van is pretty much unbeatable, even with the fast networks that post-houses have between themselves... transferring physical media used to be called 'sneakernet' when walking across the room, it's just been scaled up slightly
I'm quite impressed that a pigeon can do 100km in 2.5 hours though, I had no idea they were *that* fast...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Finally, I can start implementing my MORSE OVER IP OVER PIGEON CARRIER protocol stack!!
DrkBr
That's it, I'm switching to PSL. (Pigeon Subscriber Line)
"What is the average velocity of a data-laden pigeon . . ."
A 5 ounce bird cannot carry a 4 GB coconut!
- A
You'd lose both a huge amount of your data and your only connection should something happen to those pigeons. Still, it's more reliable than AOL.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Insert obligatory joke here about "dropping packets"....
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
The bandwidth might be good, but the latency stinks... just try playing networked Quake 3 over that!
I feel sorry for the pigeon who needs to be hashed on the other end to check if it's the same one... that's gotta hurt.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Try wiretapping that you FBI bitches
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
3h 54Mins
Ping time is twice that. Doh!
If I had something intelligent to say, I would have said it.
Now if I can train my pets to fetch me playboys from local 7-11s, I am as good as without broadband.
Is it already April 1st somewhere?
we replace those tiny 4 GB memory cards with 1.44 MB floppies. Lets see how far those flying rats get with 4 GB of floppies attached to their frickin' heads.
That's all fine and good if you know where you're sending your packets. But what if you have to do a DNS look up? Then you have to send several scout pigeons to the nearest aviary which will in turn send a pigeon back with a map of where to send your data pigeons.
And there's a whole other issue with those bastard Verisign Pigeons, but I'm not going to get into that now.
There's also a risk of packet sniffers who use various means to down your pigeons and read your data (no router protection).
And if they do happen to down your pigeon, they can give it new data and send it on its way as if it came from your IP (iniating pigeon). WATCH OUT CREDIT CARDS!
The solution of course is to use Pretty Good Pigeons to protect your data.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
What is that in Library of Congress'?
can we now rate MBps in MPH?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
..but can they stream?
-- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
The Worlds Record for Data Transfer in a Station Wagon"
Basically, a station wagon of 35 gig tapes from SETI is driven to it's destination. Takes 16 hrs to fill 1 tape.
Although it is very humorous to see pigeons used, they are still prone to packet failure (automatic weapons fire).
Yep, and I believe it was one of the guys from MS Research that said he could buy new servers with RAID arrays and send them cross country for less than the cost of a network link that could support the same kind of data transfer =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually, the distance involved matters not. Bandwidth is purely the time to put data on the line. Latency is the time it takes to get from A to B. So the bandwidth would be the same no matter how far they travelled or how fast they flew. A good simile is bandwidth is how many tapes you can load in your trunk per hour. Latency is how fast you can drive those tapes to your destination.
Scott, Keeper of the Crystal Flame
Yeah but the ping times suck right...
/T
Stack a 747 full of writable dvd's and you get hell of a bandwidth...
Or even better...
Put em on a superfreighter class ship...
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
I can throw 10,000 DVDs in my trunk, and drive 100km in an hour
How long does it take you to load 10,000 DVDs in your trunk? Not to suggest that you still wouldn't beat the pigeons, but I don't think your time would be as good as you are hoping.
Would that be considered "great bandwidth"?
Yes, but that latency would not be considered so great.
Besides, if they can use 3 pigeons, why not compare it to 3 DSL lines?
You could, or you could compare one pigeon with dial-up. Or you could compare with an 18-wheeler instead of the trunk of your car.
Lighten up - this is a great hack! And better than another SCO story.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
I want to know the Coconut Transfer rate of a Swallow.
And to make this reference complete....
both African and European Swollows!
Pigeons carrying data? Web page has photos of baby birds as a way to replicate the system, photos of turtles for no good reason.
I think the posts for April Fools Day have started to arrive. Damn, it's early this year.
Better get mine in, then: LZip for DOS - Yes, lzip 2.0 has been ported to DOS! Lzip is an advanced file compression utility that generates smaller file sizes than either gzip or bzip2, and does so much faster. Lzip can achieve these goals because it it based on a so-called "lossy" compression scheme.
You've obviously missed the bigger joke-
. blug.linux.no/rfc1149/</a>
<A href=http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/>http://www
It's been implemented!
Paul
http://www.pauldrobertson.com
when PETA learns about their firewall!
is all the 'packets' they drop
What this goes to show is that a cheap and somewhat reliable technology can sometimes put our high-tech stuff to shame when response time is not a factor.
NetFlix is the most commonly cited example, how they can send a DVD over USPS faster than that information more often than not faster and cheaper than it could have been delivered over the Internet.
Sometimes moving the data physically is better than moving the data by wire, and this should always be taken into account when designing an information system. The Internet's great, but it's not the solution to all data transfer needs.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of shithawks carrying tiny memory cards"
You can eat the pigeons (squab, actually) when they arrive.
And yes, just like chiken, but better.
...is trying to turn all of our isp's into Stool Pigeons anyways.
I trrew my DVD collection across the room yesterday. That's 1 terabyte per second, right?
The ancient sport of "The pigeon war, better known as kash al-hamam, involves having opponents keep their flocks up circling in the sky as they try to lure each other's pigeons into their flocks."
So the pigeon carrier signal can be hijacked, and data can be stolen in a new kind of man-in-the-middle type attack specific to the pigeon protocol.
Additionally, this type of attack is freighted with geopolitical intrigue: this pigeon war sport is practiced in Lebanon, which, being a place of conflict with Israel, renders yet another dimension of threat to the robustness and security of the pigeon carrier signal.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not a fair comparison against DSL...they multiplexed the pigeons. This is just more anti-DSL FUD
;P
-Turkey
But I think there is work on extending the TCP/IP protocols for interplanetary missions, so timeouts etc might be OK?
There is an old saying -- "Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded with magnetic tape".
(Today that would be CDs och DVDs, of course.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
I'm quite impressed that a pigeon can do 100km in 2.5 hours though, I had no idea they were *that* fast...
Yeah, they definitely are some pretty interesting little buggers, expecially since you would never think that of these deprecated and ubiquitous birds.
Consider their capacity to learn the route, in additional to the purely physical fait of flying the distance.
Sigged!
"The technology eliminated the need for cat 5..."
In fact, I would recommend not using ANY kind of cat technologies with this protocol.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
When a Clear Channel radio station changes formats and therefore needs a large volume of music on site quickly, they usually send a server that is pre-loaded with the new format worth of music on HDs, and the studio just plugs that into their network. This also gives them the capability to change the format overnight without anybody at the studio complex needing advanced notice, so that soon-to-be-unemployed DJs don't see it coming and therefore leave the station a few days early to ruin the transition... the UPS delivery of the new music comes in a non-descript cardboard box which can be scheduled to be on the site just hours before the changeover happens.
Actually, that's a working pace for a pigeon. They were working hard, but not really what you could call "trying." Birds are fast.
Mind you a duck will overhaul a pigeon. That fat body is all wing flapping muscle. A duck is built to fly fast, high and for days at a time if needed. A duck in fear of its life can break 100 kph in level flight. An Eider just trying to get somewhere in a hurry for no particular reason has been clocked at 76 kph. That's the current officially confirmed record.
Nevermind the falcon that eats the pigeon creating packet loss.
I have no idea what the achievable bandwidth of a duck is though. They could deliver data intercontinetally. Having to wait through migratory periods would probably kill it pretty good.
KFG
For large datafiles. You load them onto harddrives and overnight them to the destination. For large amounts of data it is -by far- the fastest.
We didn't receive any messages, and Captain BlackAdder did not shoot this delicious, plump-breasted pigeon.
I was wondering if homing pigeons were extint.
This FAQ answered that question and many others for me.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
this actually works. here in nz, a caving tour company uses pigeons to ferry memory sticks back to base so the digital photos can be waiting when the tourists get back. http://www.waitomo.co.nz/pigeonpix.html
Duck homing is pretty precise. I have ducks and geese in my "backyard" (the Mohawk River) who manage to find the exact same favorite pool every year from whatever far flung warmer clime they spend it in (the bastards).
The problem as I see it is that pigeons are dogs and ducks are cats. Tell a pigeon to carry something through antipigeon fire to save the regiment and the otherwise intelligent animal will say, "Oooooooo, Oooooooo, can I? Pleeeeeeeeeese!"
Whereas you to try to tell a duck that and he'll say, "Yeah, right Sparky. Blow me. Why don't you just run along and carry it yourself? Or maybe ask that stupid pigeon. I'll bet he'll do it. A pigeon will do anything. Just ask that Skinner dude."
Which is why no duck has ever won a Crouix de Guerre. On the other hand no duck is standing on his remaining leg stuffed in a museum either.
The ducks like it that way.
That isn't to say that a duck won't oblige by carrying a message, but it'll go when he wants, where he wants.
If that happens to coincide with your needs, fine and dandy, if not, well, tough noogies.
KFG
Sometimes they come with notes attached.. it's like fortune cookies with wings!
This just got me to thinking about some of the other interesting thought experiments out there like the infinite monkeys protocol, or IP over bongo drums...
The useful thing about pigeons is that they're really reliable for getting data between two places, albeit slow. (On the subject of firewalling, a recent study I read determined that pigeons follow roads as a convenient navigation tool... blow up a road, and see packet loss???)
Some other methods (read: transport media) come to mind, but the difficulty is in finding one that can cover as great distances as pigeons reliably or within a reasonably timely fashion. Or more importantly, ensuring that the data is transmitted between two points of your choosing (arrival at other locations would represent 'lost' packets).
As I mentioned, bongo drums have already been proposed, and I believe smoke signals, light flashes with mirrors.
Some other ideas that come to mind might not work as well.
1) A one-way protocol could involve damming a river & transmitting information by releasing water, or more simply using colored dye to send a signal downstream... Perhaps it could be augmented for upstream bandwidth using Salmon (during spawning season) Pros: very reliable downstream Cons: not as reliable upstream, low bandwidth. Improvements: data could be floated in some sort of vessel to improve bandwidth.
2) Release of a large number of weather balloons could transport data, but would literally rely on the wind for delivery at the proper location.
Pros: redundancy increases with increase in weather balloons, bandwidth could be relatively high. Cons: no guarantee of reception of packets (but isn't that whay IP is all about?) High latency.
3) This one is my favorite: using seismometers and some device capable of creating a detectable disturbance, data could be transmitted through the entire planet reliably, with relatively low latency, at a low bandwidth. Pros: reliability, low latency. Cons: building demolitions are detectable, but what would be the smallest detectable vibration that wouldn't be lost in background noise? Use of explosives could work, but unfortunately, those are tough to replace, dangerous, etc.
After that, my ideas get admittedly... weird.
4) The butterfly protocol: butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, it rains in New York. Not very reliable. Too subject to interference.
5) Similar to the seismograph idea, using a gravitometer and a large enough mobile mass, such as a train engine, data could be represented by the location of that mass. Orient it one way, you have a zero, rotate it the other way, the center of gravity shifts, and you have a one. What range could this work at? How much mass would you need? How much energy required to move it? Pros: could work without fear of interference by RF, solar flares, etc at very large distances. Propagation of signal at light speed. Cons: energy required to move the mass, low bandwidth.
6) Encode the data into the DNA of a microscopic organism, release into the wild, wait for it to propagate and eventually be picked up at the destination. Pros: DNA allows for extremely reliable transmission of data. The packet will likely get there uncorrupted. You can fit a lot of data into a strand of DNA. Cons: possible environmental hazards, packet loss due to environmental factors that kill the organism, high latency. (Perhaps this is already being done... why else do we have a new strain of flu coming from China each & every year?)
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
What's the average speed in megabits of a laden sparrow.
African or Europen
What? I Dont know
AHHHHHHHHHHHH
This reminds me of an operating system class I took. The prof presented a module on estimation, with wacky examples like figuring out the average rainfall in the Mississipi watershed. The final test problem on this subject was to estimate the amount of data that could be stored in a professor's office full of DAT tapes.
Remembering the data storage capacity of a DAT tape was simple. However after estimating the size of a tape (including the sleeve?), the size of an office, guessing whether there was furniture, etc, I would be surprised if anyone was within two orders of magnitude of the "correct" answer.
Er ... actually, no. It's been April Fools' Day in the Cook Islands for quite a while (I can't be bothered working out how long). It's been April Fools' Day in Adelaide for almost 10 1/2 hours, and in Greenwich (the home of the Greenwich Meridian) for about 50 minutes. I don't think it'll be April Fools' Day in the continental US for some hours, but it's certainly April Fools' Day in China and India.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
We are obviously on the verge of a revolution in communications and networking! Clearly, if it turns out that Internet can be cheaply had via pigeon, the price of broadband will drop, and millions of homes all across America will soon be wired (or "flown" or "pigeon-linked" or whatever it'll eventually be called) into our glorious information superhighway! Millions will be able to enjoy the Internet and will be able to use it productively, to improve the quality of their lives, and download tons of free porn! The world shall become a more enlightened, happier civilization! And it'll all be thanks to the pigeons! God bless them!
"That fat body is all wing flapping muscle"
I read this and instantly got a mental picture of some poor geek in a bar modifying it for use as a pick-up line.
[matt]
"I paid my money, I refuse to be inconvenienced." -Karl Cocknozzle
When they find out that this technology can be used to transfer copyrighted material, and therefore showing up as a potential infringement, those pigeons are going to be in a whole lot of trouble.
After all, why on earth will somebody want to transfer 4 GB of data in such a unlawful and secret way? :)
you dirty pirates!
There used to be a sysadmin who worked where I now work who used to big on everything2.com. One of his greatest nodes was this one. It discussed in absurdly great length the theoretical "bandwidth" of "a station wagon full of quarter-inch tapes".
;)
It made me laugh picturing this guy writing this. Because this is the guy who would suspend production servers from ropes dangling from ceiling AC ducts.
The problem is, a single packet drop could actually kill someone.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
but do these "pigeons" run Lin...sorry wrong thread. :)
UHG! I am turning off my computer for tomorrow... SLASHDOT BE DAMNED! hahahahahahahahahaha
I'd say it was 5Cats.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, when the pigon does what pigons do, is that considered an ICMP-Packet-Administratively-Denied?
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
They compare it to the implementation of RFC1149 in Bergen by BLUG,however this is clearly a breach of 1149.
From RFC1149:
[snip]
Frame Format
The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg length.
[/snip]
See. One IP datagram, one scroll of paper. The community demands interoperability tests if CPIP is ever to become a standard
*sigh*
computers let you make more mistakes faster, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
I pity those who have no time to do things that are fucking useless, from time to time.
But, as an implementor of rfc1149 (I'm in the Bergen LUG), we saw this attitude quite a lot. There was basically only two kinds of feedback, those who GOT it, and those who said a variation of the above.
The truth is, we had a lot of fun, we still have a lot of fun, and I still see references to our implementation all over. Moreover, it is being used to freshen up network lectures all over the world , and I once toyed with the idea of making a documentary about IP networking based on it. Many of the concepts serves as good analogies and real-live, not dull "electrical signals" examples that no-one understand.
So, rfc1149 useless? No way!
It is well known that Google has used pigeon power for years. http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html