Pigeon Turns Out To Be Faster Than S. African Net

inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."

Comments

Re:In defense of the cable...

[Ma8thew]

Homing pigeons are not trained. Their ability is innate.

Re:This is useless reporting

[Calydor]

From the /. article also linked in the summary:

"Just a few days after this Slashdot article, South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service), is being pitted against a homing pigeon to see which can deliver 4GB of call centre data logs quickest over a distance of around 80km (50 miles). According to the official website, the race is set to take place September 10."

You can calculate the speed and it's damning

[Moraelin]

Actually, we know it was 4 GB and that in 2 hours the Telekom transferred only 4% of that data. Let's say approximately 4000 MB for ease of calculation. A whole 4% of that is 160 MB transferred in two hours.

Now bytes are not bits, and network speeds are usually specified in megabits per second. Allowing for handshake, headers, etc, and again going just for a rough ballpark figure, I'll take x10 for the bytes to bits conversion.

So it's 1600 megabits in 7200 seconds. 1600 / 7200 = 0.22 megabit / sec.

Honestly, even ADSL upload speeds in the western world tend to be better than that.