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

This is useless reporting

[azav]

The size of the data file is not mentioned nor is the upload speed. Was the pigeon carrying a terabyte of information or 4K? Who knows? Incomplete and useless reporting.

Re:In defense of the cable...

[damn_registrars]

I understood perfectly. You basically said "in defense of cable" that it was cheaper than training pigeons, which is more costly in time and money.

Wrong again, you assumed that to be my argument. I did not assert one to be cheaper than the other. I was arguing that the logic presented was incomplete.

Much like your own analysis of what I have been saying:

Now you're trying to backpeddle and pretend you never said that

There is no backpedaling, no matter how much you may assert (or misspell) it. Kindly go back and re-read what I have written, without your own assumptions.

, but it seems quite clear - you forgot laying cable ALSO requires traiining and money and time.

I never claimed that was done magically or at no cost. However you will find that in other posts I have pointed out that cable is not laid for single purposes; pigeons are single purpose. Furthermore between a point A and a point B, very little of the cable used for communication is specifically laid for the occupants of point A or point B in most cases. The same cannot be said of the pigeons, their preparation, or their deployment.

Right now I'm leaning towards the pigeon being cheaper

Since you seem to have no concern for my opinion on the matter, I won't worry about yours either.

It's certainly faster (about 50 times faster).

At the very least you need to divide that number by two, as someone had to get the pigeon down to point B so it could return to point A. And that is only if you assume that the trip for the pigeon to point B was at the same speed (around 50mph) as it took to get back to point A when flying (and that is also only if you assume that the bird immediately leaves point B for point A with no time between).