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

Not a fair comparison

[localman57]

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?

Re:Not a fair comparison

[CRCulver]

I bet your carrier-pigeon vendor didn't talk about that part, did he?

Not only that, but his assistant kept touching my wife's ass, and after he wrapped up his sales presentation and left, we noticed all the silverware was gone. I'd advise all to keep well away from these carrier pigeon vendors, even if they seem slick.

Cloud computing

[Errol backfiring]

This give a new meaning to "cloud computing". Just look at the clouds to see the results coming in!

Take that!

[palemantle]

They forgot to mention that they also got the pigeon to stop and poop all over the Telkom bosses enroute.

My professor used to say

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:In defense of the cable...

[kick6]

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.

Not really all that surprising these days

[Bicx]

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).

Re:Pigeons RULE!

[dintech]

For the love of God, just don't try to send any data throgh it's secure socket...

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.