Slashdot Mirror
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."
that training and money went into creating this network that cannot keep up with a pigeon.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Never underestimate the datarate of a truck loaded with CDs. The latency is a bitch, though.
Seems the same applies to pigeons with flash cards.
A couple of important things were omitted that are important to the pigeon - in particular the time and money that went into training the bird to make that flight. They didn't exactly just reach out of their office window and grab any pigeon that happened to be nearby.
I don't think thats important at all. Its not like they reached out the window, and grabbed any phone line either. This was simply comparing quality of service between two provider's networks. Telekom lost.
Internet speed is expected to improve once a new 17,000 km underwater fiber optic cable linking southern and East Africa to other networks becomes operational
I thought this "contest" measured the speed of an internal data transfer within SA.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
with the size of USB drives you can buy for under $20, I would dare to say that the same experiment would probably have the same results over here in the states (at least with cable and DSL). If I strapped just an 8GB USB drive to a pigeon's leg and had it fly the same distance in around an hour, there's no way my internet connection could beat ~8GB/hr, or approximately 18Mbps (if I calculated correctly).
A trained pigeon with a large enough capacity USB stick stuck to it will be faster than the internet in almost any country. It scales great too, just add more pigeons. It's a pipe. The problem is the latency sucks. The post office (or in this case pigeon army) has unlimited bandwidth, but terrible latency. If you want to send some one a few blue rays' worth of data, do you email it? Then your fired. Just put them in the damn post, it will get there much faster.