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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."
Suck it, non-pigeons.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
What's the speed of an unloaden African swallow?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fine. So your data rate is higher. But the fact is, a carrier pigeon is only half-duplex, whereas your network connection, though slower, is full-duplex. I bet your carrier-pigeon vendor didn't talk about that part, did he?
This give a new meaning to "cloud computing". Just look at the clouds to see the results coming in!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
They forgot to mention that they also got the pigeon to stop and poop all over the Telkom bosses enroute.
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?
That was Telekom, the government owned telephone and internet semi-monopoly.
They don't have to compete.
40 years ago it was put your name on a list and wait up to five years to get a (wired) phone.
Now it's put your data on the wires and wait for it to get delivered.
But I wonder why I can get to SA web sites and search engines like brabys.co.za and ananzi.co.za fairly quickly.
Homing pigeons are not trained. Their ability is innate.
They've been Pigeowned.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
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.
It's a nice demo of pigeon power, but did they think about pigeon packet loss ? I'm sure it'll be a little more important than cable packet loss
I didn't found something funny to put here.
Excellent proof of concept by Lord Vetinari. I do hope Moist Von Lipwig gets this contract as well. Increased pigeon poo fertilizer along the main trunk lines should help agriculture in the region as well. Remind me to participate in the subsequent land-snatching.
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."
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Would have made a good premise for a Goodfeathers episode.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Back in the day (mid 1970s) when IBM appended "AM" (for Access Method) to all of their protocols, we had BTAM (Basic Telecommunications), TCAM (TeleCommunications), and VTAM (Virtual Telecommunications, which is still around today) to move data. It was widely acknowledged that when it came to raw bandwidth, even over long distances, PTAM (Pickup Truck Access Method) beat them all. You load up a pickup truck with hundreds or thousands of 200MB tapes and drive it across the country.
With 16GB micro SD cards, the statement holds true even today.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Homing pigeons are not trained. Their ability is innate.
Kind of true, but training helps, that's why pigeon racing is a sport - different training methods produce different results (though breeding helps too, of course). In war, they were often trained to find a "moving home"... an ability that is certainly needs training
What about latency? Surely it is orders of magnitude larger with pigeons than with even worst possible fiber connections? We are talking minutes versus tens to hundreds of a second. Something anybody with knowledge on networks knows already. Then again, since for most IT companies bandwidth is more important than latency, I guess pigeons make more sense to them. In fact, that is what I would have used. Every time I had to send a gigabyte of media data back when I was in advertisement media business, I wish I had remembered about pigeons. So, for any case where latency is not a factor, pigeons rule. In all other cases however we need any kind of fiber.
50 Win points (TM) to whoever tagged this "half-duplex"
No, *I* was 4 gigabyte on an USB key! And so was my wife.
Already been tried and tested....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
A major source of packet loss...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
From the article:
Well, that's because you used email. If you'd sent it pigeon post, it would have got through!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I could transfer 4gb faster by tossing an SD card across the room than I could by sending it over our LAN, that doesn't mean the LAN is bad, or slow, it just means that "a Truck full of harddrives has more bandwidth than the whole of the internet"[admitting that "whole of the internet" is a meaningless term in terms of bandwidth]- point being that bandwidth isn't everything
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
... of the quote at the bottom of the page as of 8:55AM (EST): "It's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon. -- Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"
Why is everybody discussing the technical validity of using pigeons to transfer data? (except of course to generate semi-interesting puns and whatnot)
It is a PR stunt to get more non-technical people to take note of Telkom's practices putting a brake on parts of our economy. (nevermind the breaks our "government" is putting on...)
Patent application granted to "Telkom Communications" for a "method for transmitting data via avian carrier", even though lots of prior art exists.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
I fear that this might have been an unfair comparison, though. The pigeon was, after all, dedicated to only that one transfer.
For a more apples-to-apples comparison with most companies' networks, the pigeon should also be transporting:
- a porn DVD or two
- half the collection of lolcat movies on youtube
- and half the collection of funny clips
- a periodic refresh of Slashdot, in 1 second intervals.
- an IRC session on sexnet for the network admin. Logging connections doesn't apply to him, after all. You can contact him under the nickname Linda1991 faster than through the internal channels.
- a couple of managers' correspondence with the distressed widdow of a nigerian prince. Hey, they're only trying to help her.
- a trojan download or two, from those guys in marketing who got admin rights on their computer because they can't work without it. And now can't work without the latest animated gizmo off www.i-pwn-your-machine.ru.
- the keylogger traffic in the other direction from the couple more who already downloaded it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
so you just have one pigeon from the other office boxed up with your memory stick. the first pigeon arrives, you take the other office's pigeon out of the box, take the memory stick, put in a new memory stick, put your pigeon in the box, attach the box to the previously boxed pigeon, and send him back from whence it came.
What if you just strapped one pigeon onto another pigeon? Each pigeon goes one direction. Thus if we strap two pigeons together we have a bidirectional avian connection. The future is now.
ed duval the very last person
Then your fired.
My fired what?
The post office is a packet-switched network, where the packets are known as letters or parcels. A DNA sample sent through the mail may contain well more than 4GB in a single "packet."
For electronic packet-switched networks, there may be some applications where a 4GB packet is appropriate. If the cost of resending lost packets is very low even fi the packet size is huge and the overhead cost per packet is high but fixed per packet, a larger packet size might be in order. Maybe not 4GB, but very likely more than the typical ~1.5Kb for most LAN networks.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
.. is the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Pigeon?
RFC1149 - Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
RFC2549 - IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html
We recently ran a similar experiment at work where we took 2 copies of a 50 page document and asked one student to scan and email it to the neighboring desk, and we got another student to hand deliver the second copy over the same distance.
The results were startling.
We have now opted to remove all computer equipment from our offices as we consider them inferior to manual transfer of information.
>>>>>God you dense.
>>Your typing leaves something to be desired.
It's not a typo or grammatical error. It's Ebonics. ;-)
.
>>>I never suggested such a thing, you made it up based on how you (mis)read what I wrote.
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.
Now you're trying to backpeddle and pretend you never said that, but it seems quite clear - you forgot laying cable ALSO requires traiining and money and time.
Right now I'm leaning towards the pigeon being cheaper. It's certainly faster (about 50 times faster).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall