Race Pits Pigeons Against Poor UK Rural Broadband

Mark.JUK writes "Rural internet access in the United Kingdom, like many other countries around the world, is slow. So slow in fact that Trefor Davies, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at business ISP Timico, has decided to pit a typical rural broadband connection against homing pigeons (with attached memory cards) to see which can get 200MB of HD video data across an 84 mile trip the fastest. Meanwhile a farmer will attempt to upload the same video file to YouTube before the pigeons can complete their journey. The comical stunt is designed to raise awareness of the often woeful broadband speed experienced by many people who live in remote and rural parts of their country. However Davies does admit that 'there isn't a benchmark for pigeon data speeds,' yet."

Comments

African or European?

[paintballer1087]

Are these African or European pigeons?

Re:African or European?

[SMoynihan]

European. The African pigeon beat broadband last year. Early pigeon protocol (PP) trials were also spearheaded in the States last year.

Re:African or European?

[Blue Stone]

And how are they dealing with the 100% Peregrine Falcon packet loss problem?

Re:African or European?

[grey1]

uprate the parent - it's got pointers to the benchmark (i.e. the trial in S. Africa last year) for pigeon data speeds, in contrast to the claims of the story.

Re:African or European?

[Pojut]

With frickin' laser beams...what else?

Re:African or European?

[paintballer1087]

Hmm, redundant on the first post... How does that work?

Re:African or European?

[equex]

Either because the pun in question concerns swallows not pigeons, or pun is just too obvious wich is my bet. How a Monthy Python joke can be redundant is beyond me though.

Re:African or European?

[mcgrew]

Wow, what idiots got mod points today? A humorous on-topic post gets modded "redundant"? WTF? OK, I'm doing my part here, waste your mod points on me, because MY COMMENT IS REDUNDANT AND OFFTOPIC. Please waste your mod points modding me down; my karma remains excellent and I can easily stand a downmod.

Hopefully it won't be the people that mod a good comment down that waste their points here.

BTW, someone please mod the parent "funny". His post is on topic, NOT redundant, and smile-invoking. Oh, and if you didn't get the joke you don't belong here and you REALLY should not have gotten mod points.

Re:African or European?

[DrgnDancer]

To be fair, Pigeon Protocol may be high bandwidth, but the latency is terrible. And Gods forbid you miss a packet.

Re:African or European?

[Defenestrar]

DDT

Re:African or European?

[KiloByte]

Just never use biplanes... that has been tried many times, without any success.

Re:African or European?

[elfprince13]

RFC 1149 is 20 years old at this point, not just from last year.

Re:African or European?

[Bigjeff5]

Chill out dude, bad mods almost always get corrected. Like you said, the people who don't get the joke are the minority here. The moderator may also have simply been tired of the meme, which case an opinion of "Redundant" is justified.

Most of us like it though, so it gets corrected.

It's nothing to start a crusade over, jeeze.

Re:African or European?

[mcgrew]

I would have refrained, except I've seen a shitload of bad moderations this morning. I'm glad to see that he wound up with a +5 funny, and equally pleased that the my comment you responded to was modded down. Even though "troll" was a mismod, I found that humorous, as well.

Note that it wasn't me who wrote the original comment whose moderation I was complaining about, nor was it anyone in my friends/fans list.

Re:African or European?

[Molochi]

Is there conversion rate from pigeon to station wagon?

Re:African or European?

[sakdoctor]

The pigeons would gain excellent compression carrying this page, since everyone made the same joke.

Re:African or European?

[HermMunster]

I believe the pidgeon would beat the station wagon as it doesn't have to stop signs, other driver, traffic speeds, and bad maps to follow.

Re:African or European?

[HermMunster]

With the same missile system the US military uses on their drones.

Re:African or European?

[HermMunster]

They were transferring a 200mb file. The upside is that the 2gig card they used can hold 10x that. Imagine adding multiple 16gig (or better) cards. Sort of blows broadband out of the water.

A couple weeks ago I pulled 2gig and 4gig cards out of the washer. I let them sit for a couple days and tried them. They worked -- all the data was still there.

Re:African or European?

[CarpetShark]

The African pigeon beat broadband last year.

Wow, a year faster than british rural broadband. AND it did it with a smaller packet. As we all know, obtaining low-level services from lady pigeons en route is difficult when your packet isn't relatively impressive.

Re:African or European?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats the compression ratio? 3 kilobytes per dvd?

Re:African or European?

[Pharmboy]

A couple weeks ago I pulled 2gig and 4gig cards out of the washer. I let them sit for a couple days and tried them. They worked -- all the data was still there.

But how did the pigeon fare?

Re:African or European?

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

Indeed. It's also not quite as secure; usually, when you drop packets, you don't have to worry about someone else picking them up. Talk about "man in the middle"...

Re:African or European?

[Unequivocal]

I think there's some wooshing going on from other replies to your post.. Nice ref to Tanenbaum. That networking bible has done more for my career than any other book.

Re:African or European?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will now patent "The Means to transfer data over Pidgeons", and ill make lots of money sueing ppl >. (--- evil face)

Re:African or European?

[Bourdain]

I'm still waiting to find out the conversion rate for unladen swallows.

Re:African or European?

[Reziac]

The pigeon protocol is also subject to damage from external hawks, which can cause total packet loss.

Re:African or European?

[RaymondKurzweil]

I would have refrained, except I've seen a shitload of bad moderations this morning. I'm glad to see that he wound up with a +5 funny, and equally pleased that the my comment you responded to was modded down. Even though "troll" was a mismod, I found that humorous, as well.

If I were not a ethnically Jewish now secular transhumanist... I would be praying for you.

Re:African or European?

[Lobachevsky]

It only beans the station wagon in terms of latency. I'm sure a station wagon has far greater bandwidth than a pigeon. I can fit 500 3TB disks in there (1.5 PB), and drive from California to New York in 1 week (That's 21Gbit/s). Short of a 16-wheeler, I don't think anything at the consumer level has that sort of bandwidth.

Re:African or European?

[skids]

Payload-wise, It's 0. Unladen swallows consist only of a packet header.

Re:African or European?

[fbartho]

I think you're wrong. Station Wagon (SW) would equate to thousands of pigeon-carrying-capacities (PCC). When you're dealing with that datavolume, you end up with significant overhead at each end. Generating the packet burst, and tieing them to individual pigeons, and then sending them; Subsequently you need to accept the incoming PigeonPackets (PP) reorder them, and then read them back in. With SWs you can use much higher density drives, and they need much less processing to load into the SW. I imagine with a pigeon load in the thousands, you'll have a fairly significant attrition rate, and you won't know which packets go missing till you've received them. In fact arbitrary pigeons might just exhibit really high latency, and PETA might be unhappy if you try to implement strict TTLs on them. While a SW needs to follow road rules, those are infact just routing considerations, and as such help the network stay robust. With PPs you have to worry about tons of sources of packet loss. If your SW packet arrives, you can usually treat that as atomic success; (Ignoring the risk of highway robbery) and you have to worry less about your data integrity.

In conclusion if your data density is above 10 PCCs I'd say a SW would be a better bet.

Note: using a RAID scheme could allow for higher attrition rates.

Re:African or European?

[yabba-dabba-do]

As someone who has been the Man In The Middle of a pigeon's dropped packet, I can tell you it is not a pleasant experience.

Re:African or European?

[mcgrew]

Don't worry about me, I have karma out the wazoo.

Re:African or European?

[RaymondKurzweil]

Don't worry about me, I have karma out the wazoo.

Well now I have to pray about your wicked immoral behavior with your wazoo.

Re:African or European?

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

No, but now you get a free memory card out of it!

Re:African or European?

[Vegemeister]

Call it 18 Gb/s, to allow for error correction.

Re:African or European?

[KingAlanI]

Was Tanenbaum the guy who used the station wagon full of tapes thing to illustrate bandwith vs. latency?
Evidently yes; the Wiki page on 'sneakernet' does quote that. That term was the first thing I thought of.

Re:African or European?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried filling the Station Wagon with Pigeons ?

Re:African or European?

[jc42]

I believe the pidgeon would beat the station wagon as it doesn't have to stop signs, other driver, traffic speeds, and bad maps to follow.

OTOH, there were several interesting studies published in the past few years, in which researchers in the UK and Italy attached GPS gadgets to pigeons and recorded their flights. They found that the pigeons mostly did follow the roads, and occasionally other linear features like streams and power lines. They described pigeons reaching a rotary, flying around it several times (Whee!), and then heading off along one of the other roads. It's true that they didn't have to obey signs or signals. But they apparently did have good maps inside their tiny brains, because they were pretty good at finding an optimal road route back home from wherever they were released. In some cases, the routes were longer than necessary due to the vagaries of the local road system.

Re:African or European?

[cyclomedia]

If you make the initial request via POTS ("Send me a copy of Movie.avi please") and they then release one of your pigeons (you'd need a broadband dealer that you dropped a supply of pigeons off to once a week or so) then the latency problem goes away.

Re:African or European?

[Bourdain]

too true, hadn't thought of that [apt] interpretation

Re:African or European?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a packet hit me on the shoulder you insensitive clod!!!
Off to the dry cleaners for me!

Re:African or European?

[Fjandr]

No, that only resolves the issue of request latency. The reply latency is still a problem.

Re:African or European?

[CarpetShark]

I believe the pidgeon would beat the station wagon as it doesn't have to stop signs, other driver, traffic speeds, and bad maps to follow.

Please refer to the following sections of documentation, which solve this issue:

* Wagons 2.6.4 - Outriders
* Outriders - 1.1 - Armaments

Ping times?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet they're lousy for gaming.

Re:Ping times?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well sure, since gaming relies on low latency. Pigeons have ridiculously high latency, but they also have amazingly large bandwidth since they can carry flash memory devices of many gigabytes. You may need to send two copies though as sometimes a falcon causes a "packet" to get misrouted.

Re:Ping times?

[Bigjeff5]

Yeah, but upgrading is so easy - just slap a bigger memory card on the pigeon and bam! Instant upgrade!

No messing with the cable companies, no paying extra for the service, so nice.

Re:Ping times?

[Oxygen99]

Depends, are we talking Duck Hunt?

Re:Ping times?

[xtracto]

I bet they're lousy for gaming.

Well... it depends on the type of games you actually play.

Re:Ping times?

[M8e]

Works great for chess and a lot of other games.

Re:Ping times?

[Custard Horse]

Well sure, since gaming relies on low latency. Pigeons have ridiculously high latency, but they also have amazingly large bandwidth since they can carry flash memory devices of many gigabytes. You may need to send two copies though as sometimes a falcon causes a "packet" to get misrouted.

They're still only half-duplex though.

Re:Ping times?

[Mister Whirly]

No, I am quite sure pigeons can fly and crap at the same time. Full duplex.

It won't take long.

[Kid Zero]

Given Slashdot, there'll be two complete and competing standards by the end of the day.

Re:It won't take long.

[jimicus]

And one proprietary one that everyone in the real world is using because unlike the free one, you don't need an honours degree in computer science just to set the thing up.

Re:It won't take long.

[cmiller173]

And one proprietary one that everyone in the real world is using because unlike the free one, you don't need an honours degree in Animal Husbandry just to set the thing up.

FTFY

What is your name? What is your quest?

[Ukab the Great]

What is the bandwidth capacity of an unladen swallow?

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Jurily]

African or European?

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[hedwards]

I'm guessing zero.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the bandwidth capacity of an unladen swallow?

I assume in this case the answer to the next question is "European".

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[oodaloop]

Right. He should have said otherwise unladen.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[kieran]

1 bit per swallow, unless being painted/dyed doesn't count as being laden.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Lucky75]

What? I don't know that!

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

Nonsense, you obviously use European and African swallows to represent 0 and 1's.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the bandwidth capacity of an unladen swallow?

Depends on how many bits you can fit onto a coconut.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[talesin]

Yes, but how would you represent a 0? Timed gaps assuming constant airspeed? What about error-checking given expected bit-drops due to predation? Increased signal attentuation over time as the constant stream of pigeons turns your signal path into a more inviting target?
Actually, factoring in male versus female swallows in addition to that gap, birds are trinary-capable and thereby futureproofed.

Also, it's not exactly fair to compare these. After all, the main limitation of bird-based connectivity is more the latency involved; taking the same amount of time to transfer a 1MB file or several terabytes (assuming sufficient MicroSD cards and robustness of carrier).

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[b4upoo]

That is the catch. A pigeon could carry a 64 gig memory stick as easily as a 200 megabyte stick. So unless the pigeon fails to arrive it will always win.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Anonymous Coward]

0 of course. An unladen swallow would not contain any data. Now the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is another matter entirely...

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[human-cyborg]

*facepalm*

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[inerlogic]

no, European swallow == 0
African == 1 (because i'm in the states and if they were 0 everyone would be up in arms...)

so to send data, just stream the appropriate sparrows...

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[M8e]

Male Pseudochelidon eurystominaMartin = 0
Female Pseudochelidon eurystomina Martin = 1
Male Pseudochelidon sirintarae = 2
Famale Pseudochelidon sirintarae = 3
Male Psalidoprocne nitens = 4
Female Psalidoprocne nitens = 5
Male Psalidoprocne fuliginosa = 6
Female Psalidoprocne fuliginosa = 7
Male Psalidoprocne albiceps = 8
Female Psalidoprocne albiceps = 9

Male Petrochelidon fulva = 162
Female Petrochelidon fulva = 163
Male Petrochelidon rufocollaris = 164
Female Petrochelidon rufocollaris = 165

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Pinball Wizard]

Well, the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is 11 meters per second. African or European.

http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/

However, as soon as you strap a memory card to the swallow, it is no longer unladen. By definition.

Therefore, the bandwidth capacity of an unladen swallow is zero.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Anne Thwacks]

BT broadband was not arriving for me this morning, so if the pigeon fails to arrive, it might not actually lose!

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Ant P.]

140 characters, but they're mostly noise.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only bin(ary) laden :P

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[jschen]

Yes, but how would you represent a 0? Timed gaps assuming constant airspeed?

Sounds good to me. After all, all signals in your nervous system do exactly that. The nerve can only send one signal, and it's always the exact same strength. The signal is, if you will, a generic unladen swallow, identical to any other generic unladen swallow. All that a nerve is capable of modulating is when it sends its signals.

Alternatively, the above idea of using European and African swallows works.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[The_mad_linguist]

That's the airspeed, not the velocity. With a round trip, as would be required for any ping, we end up with a velocity of zero.

Re:What is your name? What is your quest?

[tubs]

But an african swallow is non migratory, so in Europe you'll only have 0s. And in Africa you'll only have 1s for half the year. I spot a flaw in yout plan!

Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[hesiod]

I Went looking for that, and found this instead.

"Bandwidth achieved by the pigeons was 2.27 Mbps."

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[hesiod]

Oh, and another implementation of carrier pigeon data transfer, now in South Africa. Kinda blows that "there isn't a benchmark for pigeon data speeds" statement away...

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[TheRaven64]

I think you want this one for serious usage.

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[Anonymous Coward]

which Slashdot covered here:
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/09/08/1414248/SAs-Largest-Telecomms-Provider-vs-a-Pigeon?art_pos=1

and has pretty much nothing to do with IP over Carrier Pigeon since putting data onto an SD card makes no use of the IP protocol. These tests are kind of stupid, I mean I could load a bunch of two terabyte harddrives into a backpack and claim that I can walk faster than my internet connection (which is among the fastest consumer plans in the country), but that doesn't really mean anything.

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[pacinpm]

Yeah, but it's another OSI layer. I wonder what is a transfer using pidgeons over pidgeons.

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[FinchWorld]

I have attempted to expand this field of research here.

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[DrgnDancer]

It's a proof of concept. Once we have pigeon packets proved out we can give them proper packet headings and implement IP on them. We'll just have to modify the protocol standards to account for really *large* packets (16GB? 32? How big are these little drives getting these days?). Also, have you considered purchasing a sense of humor? :-)

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[thepike]

It's not really IP over pigeon, it's just data movement.

But if you coupled your pigeon distributer to a phone so you could request data and they could send it (or vice-versa) it would kind of work out, and definitely be faster than poor internet for large files. You could also just fly the pigeons back and forth, but then your requests would take a lot of time too.

And keep in mind, as data density increases, so will the amount the pigeon can carry and thus the "speed" of the pigeon network. It might actually be faster than people think.

Also it's still just a publicity stunt.

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[Anonymous Coward]

.... Also, have you considered purchasing a sense of humor? :-)

Sure, it's among the slowest in the country.

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[jonbryce]

SDHC goes up to 32GB. 16GB Micro SDs are certainly widely available and affordable. 32GB cards are also available but cost a lot more than two 16GB cards.

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[starfishsystems]

But it's quite bursty.

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[Bigjeff5]

There are CF cards small enough that I would expect a pigeon to be able to carry, which go up to 128gb.

They aren't all that popular though.

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[cmiller173]

The next SD format is SDXC and a 64GB card is available http://www.sandisk.com/products/dslr/sandisk-ultra-sdxc-cards

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[RealGrouchy]

Distance is an important measure, too.

If you compare a high-speed connection with transporting a 1TB hard disk in your car, the results will be very different if you're trying to transfer the data to a location two hundred metres away versus a location two hundred miles away.

- RG>

Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC

[Barefoot Monkey]

Oh, and another implementation of carrier pigeon data transfer, now in South Africa. Kinda blows that "there isn't a benchmark for pigeon data speeds" statement away...

That race happened almost exactly a year ago, I think. For those who don't want to follow the link, in 2009 a company called Unlimited IT set up a publicity stunt to demonstrate how terrible Internet is in South Africa. They asserted that a pidgeon could deliver 4GiB over 80km faster local broadband. Winston the pidgeon won, delivering the data in barely over 2 hours, while the ADSL line managed to get only 4% of the job done in that time. Of course, that was with upstream speeds, but even at downstream speeds it would not have been able to get more than 32% of the job done.

I believe they were using a the fastest line ADSL speed available in South Africa at the time: 4 megabits per second (max upstream 512kb/s) which costs roughly US$60 for line rental plus an additional $45 in ISP fees (depending on which ISP you choose) for a 2 gig cap plus $15 for every gig thereafter. Using a 4 meg line for the contest is generous, since most internet users in SA are on 384kb/s lines (which cost $20 a month excluding ISP).

The line rental fee goes directly to Telkom (the national telecom company), and most of the ISP fee ends up going to Telkom as well.

Now you know why South Africans are always complaining about the Internet.

Over the last year things have improved dramatically, as a new undersea cable has reduced the cost of traffic for ISPs, and ISPs now charge less than US$6 per gig. Telkom's line rentals are still the same price ($20 for 384kb, $40 for 512kb, $60 for 4mb) but some lucky 4mb subscribers are getting upgraded to 10mb.

You know life is good

[Anonymous Coward]

When your biggest worry is not getting TV RIGHT NOW!!!! Jesus, this is what passes for important stuff that matters these days?

Re:You know life is good

[Anonymous Coward]

When you hear compressed video data, you hear TV. When I hear it, I hear Angiography. When my wife hears it, she hears international video-conference. Not all of us lame around watching TV all the time. But I guess since that's what you do, it's your first response.

Re:You know life is good

[ickleberry]

This is the UK, not America where everything needs to be done RIGHT NOW!!!

Re:You know life is good

[Dunbal]

Also, it's a bit odd that you think angiography when you hear compressed video,

      Yes because medical video images are never compressed.

Re:You know life is good

[inerlogic]

not all of the US needs things done "right now," do a google search for "southern time" and you'll likely find that it's mostly just the east coast/new england where things need to be rushed....
if anyone in the rural south ever gets around to it, i'm sure they'll tell you the same.

Re:You know life is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, all these things happen in rural bumfuck UK. My first response is to RTFA, your first response is to fabricate entirely unlikely elitist scenarios to justify yourself. How's that international angiography on a farm working for you?

"Not all of us lame around watching TV all the time."

Nah, just trolling Slashdot between international angiographies. Got it.

No standard for pigeon data speeds?

[jez9999]

There's an RFC for it!

Re:No standard for pigeon data speeds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised Cmdr Taco didn't discuss RFC1149 in the summary. I expected better.

Re:No standard for pigeon data speeds?

[xded]

The problem is that there's also an implementation.

Re:No standard for pigeon data speeds?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I expect CmdrTaco not to mention it - because it's so obvious and well known, it needs no mentioning.

Pigeon bandwidth is high

[dk90406]

Latency sucks. It is simple to device tests like these to show bandwidth is limited. Heck, just load a truck with LTO tapes and ship them a few hundred miles to beat even very fast connections.

Re:Pigeon bandwidth is high

[hesiod]

With tapes-via-station wagon (as your idea was originally stated), though, you have to consider the load time of the data onto tape and tapes into the vehicle, and the time to get the data back off of the tapes.

Re:Pigeon bandwidth is high

[i.r.id10t]

Here in the South Eastern US, latency is about to go down but packet loss will go up since Dove season is starting....

Re:Pigeon bandwidth is high

[jimicus]

The LTO spec is fast enough that you need a reasonably quick disk array to keep up with one single tape drive. That really isn't a limiting factor when you compare it to broadband.

Re:Pigeon bandwidth is high

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Which is why the high-energy physics folk (CERN, Stanford, etc) ship NAS units rather than tapes.

Re:Pigeon bandwidth is high

[Anonymous Coward]

Once a year weather you need it or not. http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/191-3443428-4414231?asin=B0030GMBNK&AFID=Froogle_df&LNM=|B0030GMBNK&CPNG=&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=B0030GMBNK&ref=tgt_adv_XSG10001

Re:Pigeon bandwidth is high

[pwnies]

LTO tapes aren't your best choice for data density anymore. Right now your most dense LTO drive can store 1.5TB, whereas your most dense microSD card can store 32GB.
MicroSD Cards => .0014m * .032m * .024m = 0.000001075m^3 =>32GB / 1.075 * 10^-6m^3 = 2.98 * 10^7 GB/m^3
LTO Drive => .102m * .1054m * .0215m = 0.000231142m^3 => 1536GB / 2.31142 * 10^-4m^3 = 6.65 * 10^6 GB/m^3

A significant upgrade from RFC1149

[dkleinsc]

Although CP/IP has been implemented several times, amazingly nobody thought to improve bandwidth through the use of memory cards. I assume a new standard will be put out to take advantage of this innovation.

Re:A significant upgrade from RFC1149

[gstoddart]

Although CP/IP has been implemented several times, amazingly nobody thought to improve bandwidth through the use of memory cards. I assume a new standard will be put out to take advantage of this innovation.

Yeah, this isn't actually CP/IP since it's not using any of the IP protocols and not breaking stuff up into packets and the like.

This is more of a specialized case of the "station wagon full of mag tape" scenario.

It's hilarious, but it's not technically related to RFC1149. :-P

The DVDs

[rufty_tufty]

Yes and my 747 filled with DVDs beets the pants off the latest multi-terabit cross Atlantic fibre.

Re:The DVDs

[oodaloop]

That means nothing to me. Please use standard units like Libraries of Xongress, telephone directories, African male elephants' weight in micro SD cards.

Re:The DVDs

[iamhassi]

"Yes and my 747 filled with DVDs beets the pants off the latest multi-terabit cross Atlantic fibre."

Considering 2 tb hard drives are under $100 you'd save money by filling your 747 with hard drives since it takes 425 DVDs to equal one 2 tb hard drive.

Re:The DVDs

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Yes and my 747 filled with DVDs beets the pants off the latest multi-terabit cross Atlantic fibre."

I rather doubt that. You seem to be forgetting that you need to burn all that data to DVDs with verification enabled, carefully pack every DVD and load them all, then unpack and manually copy the data back to a machine. Don't forget that when one of those DVDs inevitably fails to properly read on the target system you need to fly back, burn a new one, and return.

Re:The DVDs

[Anonymous Coward]

A standard shipping container can carry 26600kg. I'm going to guess 650g for a 3TB hard drive, so we can put 41000 drives in a container (with loads of room for bubble wrap).

Lets have 20 of these on a train: 2,460,000TB.

Lets travel at 150km/h for, say, 150 km.

5500Tb/s.

What possible use would this have?

Re:The DVDs

[mooingyak]

Don't forget that when one of those DVDs inevitably fails to properly read on the target system you need to fly back, burn a new one, and return.

There's nothing to prevent someone from building a little bit of redundancy into the system. Reduces your bandwidth some, but it solves that last problem.

Re:The DVDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Or he could build in redundancy by taking multiple copies of the same DVD in different parts of the plane. Reduces your bandwidth, sure, but saves in the long run.

Re:The DVDs

[Zero__Kelvin]

"There's nothing to prevent someone from building a little bit of redundancy into the system. Reduces your bandwidth some, but it solves that last problem."

In order to implement redundancy you need to half your bandwidth and also burn twice as many DVDs, which is what takes the lions share of the time, so in fact building redundancy into the system is precluded.

Re:The DVDs

[nitehawk214]

That means nothing to me. Please use standard units like Libraries of Xongress, telephone directories, African male elephants' weight in micro SD cards.

New unit for data density: Libraries of Congress per Elephant

Re:The DVDs

[ultranova]

New unit for data density: Libraries of Congress per Elephant

But what do you use when the Democrats are in power?

Re:The DVDs

[mooingyak]

In order to implement redundancy you need to half your bandwidth and also burn twice as many DVDs, which is what takes the lions share of the time, so in fact building redundancy into the system is precluded.

Commercial burners burn multiple copies from a single source simultaneously. You'll lose capacity but the time to burn won't go up.

Re:The DVDs

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Commercial burners burn multiple copies from a single source simultaneously. You'll lose capacity but the time to burn won't go up."

I concede that I had not considered that option, however it is probably better to just burn one copy of each, utilize 100% bandwidth rather than 50%, and then fly back and burn the few DVDs that need re-burning.

Re:The DVDs

[mooingyak]

I concede that I had not considered that option, however it is probably better to just burn one copy of each, utilize 100% bandwidth rather than 50%, and then fly back and burn the few DVDs that need re-burning.

At this point other factors start to enter in, such as:

What's the actual data capacity of a 747 full of DVDs (let's assume we're using the most effective possible storage medium and just calling it DVDs)?

What's the ratio of capacity to data needing transfer? Obviously at 0.5 or lower, redundancy starts to become a better option.

Are there partial data sets that can be useful? What chunk of the whole do you need?
How long is the flight itself?

Those are just the one that spring to mind immediately for me.

If you're making constant repeat flights, then your method is certainly the one that's going to maximize bandwidth as you'd just put the re-burnt DVDs on the next flight with the rest of the space full of new stuff.

Re:The DVDs

[Anonymous Coward]

New unit for data density: Libraries of Congress per Elephant

But what do you use when the Democrats are in power?

Libraries of Congress per Ass

Re:The DVDs

[natehoy]

beets the pants off

Please explain in more detail how a 747 full of DVDs would cause pants to be removed by the application of vegetables. Does it require a specific species of beet? Can this technology be more widely applied to removing pants from things other than fibre?

As a father, should I be concerned if my daughter's date shows up driving a 747 full of DVDs?

Re:The DVDs

[anyGould]

New unit for data density: Libraries of Congress per Elephant

But what do you use when the Democrats are in power?

Obviously the smaller Congressional Hearings per Donkey. (The conversion is left as an exercise for the reader).

Re:The DVDs

[natehoy]

(checks) Yup, still to low-capacity and slow to back up my pr0n collection. Next idea?

Re:The DVDs

[Zero__Kelvin]

"What's the actual data capacity of a 747 full of DVDs (let's assume we're using the most effective possible storage medium and just calling it DVDs)?"

This is the only thing you wrote that I won't accept, because DVDs were specifically laid out in the initial requirements specification. Obviously, if I can start modifying the requirements I can change the resultant design quite drastically.

"If you're making constant repeat flights, then your method is certainly the one that's going to maximize bandwidth as you'd just put the re-burnt DVDs on the next flight with the rest of the space full of new stuff."

Right. Latency and bandwidth issues as well as payload issues all have a factor. This is why I have not come out emphatically saying that the person was wrong, but said instead that I rather doubt it. In any case, I think my initial point that the OPs emphatic statement in complete disregard to all of these factors was off base and probably incorrect in most if not all scenarios holds. Would you disagree? (and by the way, as silly as this discussion is, it is nice to be able to exchange points and counterpoints with someone who doesn't go immediately to the "you pointed out a possible error; what are you some kind of $DEROGATORY_LABEL ??!!! well.)

Re:The DVDs

[mcgrew]

Yes and my 747 filled with DVDs beets the pants off the latest multi-terabit cross Atlantic fibre.

Eye sea ewe ewes you're spill chucker, two! Eye owl wise ewes won.

Re:The DVDs

[rufty_tufty]

Please get your grammar correct it's:
ewe ewe's

Kids these days...

Re:The DVDs

[dwillden]

Only if said 747 is also carrying a supply of beets.

Re:The DVDs

[mooingyak]

"What's the actual data capacity of a 747 full of DVDs (let's assume we're using the most effective possible storage medium and just calling it DVDs)?"

This is the only thing you wrote that I won't accept, because DVDs were specifically laid out in the initial requirements specification. Obviously, if I can start modifying the requirements I can change the resultant design quite drastically.

As much as this is a somewhat absurd hypothetical, it seemed like once we're going down this road we might as well do it right. In my mind the question is really about physical transfer of storage medium versus copper/fiber/whatever is current. I had assumed that "747 full of DVDs" was given not because it's the pinnacle of storage medium transfer methodology but because it fairly clearly states the concept with just a few words. I've often heard the same concept expressed as "A station wagon full of hard drives".

I kind of like the thought experiment of figuring out what the optimal vehicle for this would be, once you factor in things like unloading the storage medium from the vehicle and time required to read and verify the data. It seems like a faster and lower capacity vehicle would ultimately fill the niche better than a slower but higher capacity one. In fact, the ethernet concept is in my mind the ultimate endpoint for this. But I might be persuaded that an ocean liner full of multi-terabyte drives is better.

In any case, I think my initial point that the OPs emphatic statement in complete disregard to all of these factors was off base and probably incorrect in most if not all scenarios holds. Would you disagree?

I would agree with you. My objection was mostly about how you seemed to completely dismiss the possibility of redundancy. I don't dispute your other points.

and by the way, as silly as this discussion is, it is nice to be able to exchange points and counterpoints with someone who doesn't go immediately to the "you pointed out a possible error; what are you some kind of $DEROGATORY_LABEL ??!!! well.

I was looking for a nice, juicy spelling error in here that I could then call you a moron for having. Sadly, you disappoint.

Re:The DVDs

[Zero__Kelvin]

"As much as this is a somewhat absurd hypothetical, it seemed like once we're going down this road we might as well do it right.

That is exactly how I approach things, and while it is often appreciated, it sometimes meets with great resistance ;-)

"I was looking for a nice, juicy spelling error in here that I could then call you a moron for having. Sadly, you disappoint."

You have a sense of humour as well! Please don't tell me you are a hot single babe looking for a man, who lives at some location to which I cannot get, or I'm going to break down and cry ;-)

In any case, this has truly been fun, but alas I have other matters to attend to, so please don't take it as a rudeness if I don't respond to any follow up for quite some time.

Have a great day!

Re:The DVDs

[mooingyak]

Please don't tell me you are a hot single babe looking for a man, who lives at some location to which I cannot get, or I'm going to break down and cry ;-)

I went as the Evil Queen from Snow White one year for Halloween, but nope, I'm a married guy with 3 kids in NY.

Re:The DVDs

[DriedClexler]

Not true -- since the IP over transoceanic 747 method would permit a ridiculously long block length, you could have an insanely low error rate at marginal cost to transfer rate. Shannon noisy channel coding theorem wins again!

Re:The DVDs

[thejynxed]

Multiply that by the average of 16 shipping cars per train (discounting the 8 average liquid container cars). So, 5,550 Tb/s x16 = 88,000 Tb/s as an average figure (you do the other conversion to whatever per second, I'm not bothering). I do believe you'd be able to send the entire data collection of Google, and also possibly everything contained in Microsoft's public download servers in one go.

I wonder how many Libraries of Congress that would make.

Re:The DVDs

[Anomalyst]

If your kids are in NY, where are you?
Seems shamefully neglectful, or brilliant depending on how well brought up they might be.

Re:The DVDs

[Anonymous Coward]

No, definitely not. There are algorithms that take a chunk of data, and split it into n pieces, only m of which are needed to rebuild the original data. How did you think RAID5 worked?

Re:The DVDs

[Anomalyst]

747 ... Shannon noisy channel coding

What is "stegasaurus encryption of Little Runway", Alex?
/deliberate misapprehension/spelling/etc

Re:The DVDs

[mooingyak]

When I'm not in NY, I'm out hunting people who deliberately parse my sentences wrong :)

Re:The DVDs

[Zero__Kelvin]

OK. Add six months to a year for development of the tools to handle that ;-)

Re:The DVDs

[KingAlanI]

+1 funny if I had mod points right now.
Love how people in this subthread are carrying out a serious discussion of the topic. :)

Net Neutrality

[o'reor]

now threatened by falcons and pigeon shooters. OTOH, how do you perform Deep Packet inspection on those ?

Re:Net Neutrality

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

With a scalpel?

Re:Net Neutrality

[AnonymousClown]

I find feeding them dumps the data.

Re:Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

UFOs full of aliens apparently do "deep packet inspection" on rural hunters all the time.

Oh, wait, you meant on the pigeons?

Re:Net Neutrality

[asliarun]

All this violence for what? Just to take a byte?

Re:Net Neutrality

[DarthVain]

Shotgun. Though it may cause some minor network interruption...

Re:Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

simple.

Alka-seltzer

This has already happened...

[Ecuador]

The farmer was at 24% upload after 54mins when the first pigeon landed...
Now we can get back to our Monty Python / african swallow posts...

Re:This has already happened...

[L4t3r4lu5]

84 mile trip, 54 minutes.

You're telling me the pigeon flew at 93 miles per hour? Pull the other one

Re:This has already happened...

[the biologist]

All it would take is a favorable wind at cruising altitude.

Re:This has already happened...

[jimicus]

Depending on the roads, it could well be 84 miles by road but substantially less as the pigeon flies.

Re:This has already happened...

[TheRaven64]

The article says that they fly at 50-75 miles per hour. I presume that's air speed, but a 50 mile per hour airspeed with a 50 mile per hour tail wind would get you there that fast. It still seems a bit fast, but even at the 50 mile per hour speed Wikipedia quotes, it would still take half as much time as the broadband connection, if it had only managed 24% after 54 minutes.

Re:This has already happened...

[Bigjeff5]

That's usually the case. There is a town not too far away from me physically, maybe 100 miles, but it's at least a 300 mile drive to get to it. It would take a pigeon about an hour and 20 minutes, while I would have to drive for 6 hours to get there.

Welcome to the advantages of flight - you can go up and over instead of around.

Re:This has already happened...

[Bigjeff5]

It wouldn't even need to be that much, according to that wikipedia page pigeons have already been clocked at 75mph.

Re:This has already happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but an analysis of the pigeon revealed that it have been intercepted en-route and altered by the RIAA. Small tracking implants were detected under the feathers. Also, carloads of RIAA lawyers were seen following the pigeons flight path. The pigeon and the farmers involved were subpoenaed even before it landed.

In related news, Microsoft has today applied for a patent on pigeons. It is believed to be the second instance of a corporation attempting to patent a species. Apple had previously filed a patent for penguins, although no one is sure why.

Re:This has already happened...

[CannonballHead]

Was the distance measured by roads, or as-the-crow-flies?

Re:This has already happened...

[geekoid]

the pigeon took 67 minutes.

The role of stunts in public discorse

[koterica]

Stunts like this one aren't just funny, they are sometimes effective. Case in point (regardless of how you feel about him): Micheal Moore. Sometimes, making a joke can be far more effective than, say, writing an angry letter to the editor.

Re:The role of stunts in public discorse

[operagost]

Michael Moore is definitely a joke.

Re:The role of stunts in public discorse

[Defenestrar]

Heck - it's not that far of a stretch to modify pigeon protocol (PP) for high latency space issues. Got a probe on Pluto? Best case you're going to have a latency of 13 hours. Double that for apogee.

Re:The role of stunts in public discorse

[RapmasterT]

good luck getting a pigeon to fly home from pluto

Encryption

[Nautical Insanity]

Sure, data throughput can be pretty awesome, but exchanging public keys must be a bitch.

Re:Encryption

[L4t3r4lu5]

On the plus side, "packet loss" can make for a tasty supper!

Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996).

Dropped pigeon packets?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not good a good user experience....

Not the first time, so not that original ???

[Anonymous Coward]

There are benchmarks for pigeon speeds. It's not the first time this has been done. South African bandwidth was tested just over a year or two ago. In fact the whole thing got a lot of media attention. The pigeon was even named. Google "Winston the Pigeon". Plenty on it.

Unregulated and unfiltered?

[vvaduva]

This is a ridiculous attempt to subvert government regulations...and was there a net neutrality statement issued on this transfer of data?

Never underestimate the bandwidth

[russotto]

...of station wagon full of magtape, or so the obselete saying goes.

They considered using a station wagon for this test, but they figured the roads were as poor as the broadband, so they wouldn't have known which they were testing. So pigeons were it.

Re:Never underestimate the bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

The big surprise is that the station wagon went obsolete before the magnetic tape, which is still the preferred method of bulk backup.

Re:Never underestimate the bandwidth

[mirix]

I don't know, estates are still plenty popular in europe. minivans never quite took off like they did in the US.

Probably because a station wagon is more practical and less of an eyesore. As much room, handles better, etc. (well, modern Europeans ones at least. America made some uuuugly fucking wagons back in the day.

packet loss

[Anonymous Coward]

If the pigeon drops the SD card thats 100% packet loss. Even thats a shitty connection :)

Upload speed?

[TheRaven64]

Interesting that they're measuring upload speed. My mother is on a rural ADSL connection (in the UK), and only gets 1Mb/s downstream, but she still manages to get 1Mb/s upstream, so here upload speed is actually about the same as for a lot of urban users.

Re:Upload speed?

[u38cg]

Upload speed has no technical reason to be slower than download - they simply throttle it to discourage you from running web servers at home, which is understandable. With a low quality connection like you describe, the download speed will be lower than advertised, but the upload speed should remain constant until the line quality actually becomes bad enough to affect it.

Dependent on the conditions of the race

[Sonny Yatsen]

If you change the conditions of the race, you can just as well make it say just about anything.

If you give the pigeon a 512 KB message, and an identical 512 KB message to be sent via a rural broadband connection, then the rural broadband connection will win.
If you give the pigeon a 64 GB memory card, then you could say that the pigeon has a transfer speed equivalent to 104 mbps, which'll mean it's faster than most broad connections, rural or not. (Assuming an average speed of 60 miles per hour for the bird.)

Re:Dependent on the conditions of the race

[iamhassi]

"If you give the pigeon a 64 GB memory card, then you could say that the pigeon has a transfer speed equivalent to 104 mbps, which'll mean it's faster than most broad connections, rural or not. (Assuming an average speed of 60 miles per hour for the bird.)"

Good point. Even 10mbps broadband is only 3.6 gigaBytes/hour, so a bird with a few large MicroSDHC cards strapped to them would whip the pants off broadband.

Re:Dependent on the conditions of the race

[ArundelCastle]

Aren't we also dependent on the definition of broadband? Which hasn't been formally defined if wikipedia is to be believed.
So why are they calling it poor rural broadband, instead of country-modem, city-modem? :)

Re:Dependent on the conditions of the race

[Anonymous Coward]

Even 10mbps broadband is only 3.6 gigaBytes/hour

I see you don't know much about networking.

Re:Dependent on the conditions of the race

[machinelou]

If you change the conditions of the race, you can just as well make it say just about anything.

If you give the pigeon a 512 KB message, and an identical 512 KB message to be sent via a rural broadband connection, then the rural broadband connection will win. If you give the pigeon a 64 GB memory card, then you could say that the pigeon has a transfer speed equivalent to 104 mbps, which'll mean it's faster than most broad connections, rural or not. (Assuming an average speed of 60 miles per hour for the bird.)

You're totally on the mark, but you could take the limitation you mention and turn it into a better test. For example, instead of just asking, "what is the latency to transmit a 200MB file across 84 miles?" You could ask, "What is the relationship between message size and latency for pigeons and copper wire (or, whatever they're using) over 84 miles?" This latter test would involve transmitting files of several different sizes.

I'm betting that, at some point, the curve for pigeons will either asymptote or turn over (e.g., when the mass of 32GB microSD cards begins to exceed the flight capacity of the bird).

Re:Dependent on the conditions of the race

[Anonymous Coward]

(10*60*60)=36.000Gb/hour not 3.6 but good f* luck getting a constant 10 down or 10up (which most common carriers only provide 1up).

Re:Dependent on the conditions of the race

[Sonny Yatsen]

I just pictured a pigeon struggling very doggedly with a 100 GB SSD drive dangling from its beak.

Re:Dependent on the conditions of the race

[Korin43]

I'm betting that, at some point, the curve for pigeons will either asymptote or turn over (e.g., when the mass of 32GB microSD cards begins to exceed the flight capacity of the bird).

Ah, but you can always upgrade your bandwidth by getting more pigeons.

Re:Dependent on the conditions of the race

[NonUniqueNickname]

The properties of the participants are:
n being the farmer's network speed in bits/second.
s being the airspeed velocity of an unladen pigeon.
K(d,m) -> [0,1] being the non-linear function describing how a pigeon's airspeed velocity degrades as the travel distance in meters 'd' increases and the weight carried in grams 'm' increases. Having K ~= 1 for small values of 'd' and 'm', and K = 0 for large enough values of 'd' and/or 'm'.

A property of data storage:
M(p) being the non-linear function describing the weight in grams of a digital storage device holding 'p' bits. The graph of this function looks a bit like a staircase, climbing up when 'p' becomes big enough to mandate a different storage technology (switch from memory card to hard drive) or an increase in the number of units (switch from 1 hard drive to 2 hard drives).

The parameters of the test are:
p being the payload in bits of the message.
d being the distance in meters from the farmer's home to the server (as the pigeon flies).

The farmer will complete the test in p/n seconds.
The pigeon will complete the test in d/sK(d,M(p)) seconds.

'd' affects only the pigeon, negatively. For very large values of 'd' we get K=0 and the pigeon will not complete the test.
'p' affects both negatively, but the farmer is affected linearly while the pigeon is affected in 'bumps'. Also, for very large values of 'p' we get K=0 and the pigeon will not complete the test. The farmer can handle very large 'p' with an upload resume.

Re:Dependent on the conditions of the race

[Anomalyst]

country-modem, city-modem

I'm just guessing, because nothing is modulated or demodulated, it's digital end to end?.

So you moved far away

[Anonymous Coward]

to get away from it all. Well guess what, that included the phone exchange too.
They also moan that it takes an hour for the Ambluance to get to them. That's because you live an hour away from the hospital!

Mind you, Sky say I'm on a 20mb line, but I never get more that 3-4mb. It's all a con.

They don't even mention the biggest advantage

[antifoidulus]

With the internet you just get a movie, but with the pigeon you get both a movie AND dinner delivered to your door. Talk about convenience.

Re:They don't even mention the biggest advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon: Mystery Solved!

only 200 mb?

[iamhassi]

"memory cards) to see which can get 200MB of HD video data"

Why 200MB? 8gb MicroSD are only $14, why did he bother with just 200MB? It's not like it was cheaper or saved any weight, wonder why he chose such a strange size for HD video since 200MB of HD video is what, a few minutes maybe?

Re:only 200 mb?

[ledow]

Because then the carrier pigeon would always win.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon zooming down the highway with a trunk full of backup tapes".

Same principle. You could probably attach nearly a Terabyte to a pigeon if you tried, if you had the money, etc. and pretty much wherever you sent it in Britain it would have better "bandwidth", that wouldn't prove the point at all. (However, the bandwidth might be fabulous but its latency would be atrocious).

200Mb is a not-unreasonable example - that's a single old Zip disk, and people easily have more data than that on every PC they use (as pointed out, your average camera uses 2Gb cards almost as a minimum now). By demonstrating on such a pitiful amount of data, they are providing a more far comparison. Otherwise I could easily claim that my cat has a better bandwidth than just about any Internet link in the world.

Re:only 200 mb?

[bigrockpeltr]

from my very quick calculations in my head if he uploaded 24% after almost an hour he is probably getting 128kbps upload. That is like ISDN or *gasp* two simultaneous dial up connections :O omg how cool is that? and yes i think ~200 IBM formatted HD diskettes are enough for a pigeon how do you expect to give it 8000?

Re:only 200 mb?

[Vectormatic]

the test is uploading the video to youtube, doing the same test but downloading a DVD iso from usenet obviously would draw some unwanted attention from the various groups 'representing artists and movie studios'

besides, they probably made some guesstimate as to what kind of file-size would provide an interesting match-up. pitting a pidgeon with a filled 32 GB flash card against ADSL wouldnt have been interesting

Re:only 200 mb?

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise I could easily claim that my cat has a better bandwidth than just about any Internet link in the world.

For optimal performance, you need 2^2+1 cats (something to do with parity bits, I assume). This gives rise to a popular standard networking term.

Re:only 200 mb?

[KDR_11k]

Isn't 128kB/s ISDN with bundled channels? Nobody uses that since it's too expensive.

Re:only 200 mb?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it took almost 4 hours to copy the 200MB file from one folder to another on his Apple Mac.

Re:only 200 mb?

[Dewin]

I do believe you are off by a factor of about 2.71828 in the number of required cats.

missing a vital plus in the pidgeon category

[eshbums]

Broadband cannot be grilled into a delicious snack once your download is complete.

Re:missing a vital plus in the pidgeon category

[ledow]

The Flander's Pigeon Murderer!!!

Re:missing a vital plus in the pidgeon category

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this "pidgeon category"? Does it refer to pigeons who speak pidgin?

No data? But there is: rfc 1149

[knarf]

In rfc 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) He should find all he needs to configure his pigeon network.

During hunting season...

[Haedrian]

...the network will only support UDP.

Re:During hunting season...

[qwijibo]

Even worse, every lost packet costs you real money. Network collisions could bankrupt you.

Done before

[iamhassi]

I was looking up info on carrier pigeons and found this Homing pigeon In computing
"The humorous IP over Avian Carriers (RFC 1149) is an Internet protocol for the transmission of messages via homing pigeon. Originally intended as an April Fools' Day RFC entry, this protocol was implemented and used, once, to transmit a message in Bergen, Norway on April 28, 2001.[16] In September 2009, a South African IT company, based in Durban, pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a data packed 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest internet service provider, Telkom. The pigeon named Winston took an hour and eight minutes to carry the data 80 km (50 miles). Including downloading, it took two hours, six minutes, and 57 seconds for the data to arrive, the same amount of time it took to transfer 4% of the data over the ADSL[17][18]"

So there you have if. Pigeon can transfer XXGB of data across 50 miles in 2 hours and 6 minutes, you're only limited by the size of the MicroSDHC you strap to the pigeon.

If you put a 32gb MicroSD on one you'd beat my 10mbps broadband because I can only download 3.6 gigaByte/hour.

oblig. Tanenbaum

[martas]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. pp. 83. ISBN 0-13-349945-6.

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[riegel]

hurtling

?

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[thepike]

From Merriam-Webster: hurtle (hurtling, hurtled): verb: to move rapidly or forcefully

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[Bigjeff5]

Dictionary man. That's usually where you look if you don't know what a word means.

They've got them on line now and shit, too.

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[Anonymous Coward]

They've got them on line now and shit, too.

Do they have shit online or dictionaries on shit?

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[matt_gaia]

They've got them on line now and shit, too.

Do they have shit online or dictionaries on shit?

My guess.... both.

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[devnulljapan]

I just read the stuff at the link in your sig. Interesting though it is, the guy fumbles the ball at this bit, which then undermines everything else he's saying:

To understand it you must understand the difference. Hundreds of years ago a guy named Galileo said, "the universe is really not FLAT, the way the Vatican says it is". You saw what happened to Galileo. The government, for saying such things, based on SCIENCE, executed him.

Galileo said the universe is not flat? They executed him? Huh? Kinda odd coming from someone so obsessed with truth to just make stuff up for effect.

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[doogledog]

Dictionary man

aaaand Thesaurus boy!

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[SleazyRidr]

If I wasn't at work I find you links to an example of each.

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[martas]

he uses a colorful, albeit fictional, example to illustrate a point. perhaps that's not in very good style, but i don't think it undermines what i see as a very carefully constructed and thoroughly explored argument.

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[Darinbob]

This is why these sorts of tests are merely stunts. They prove nothing useful. A really awful network will transmit "house is on fire, come home now!" faster than a pigeon will. A slow truck full of tapes will transmit data faster than the fastest network currently available.

It's a stunt because it's designed to make the network look bad and apply a sort of "medieval technology is better than these hi tech losers" association incorrectly. You first measure how fast your network is, then measure how long it takes a pigeon to fly the distance, then you choose just the right size thumb drive and file to guarantee that the pigeon wins. If the network had accidentally won this stunt because you did the math wrong then you just replace the 200MB video with a 400MB video and try again.

A real comparison should be between this network versus the competition. Ie, price + bandwidth + service + reliability as compared to other broadband offerings.

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[Chowderbags]

Are tapes still the the highest density (as in bits/volume) consumer/business grade hardware there is, or is a stack of thumb drives more space efficient? Can anyone calculate the actual bandwidth of a modern equivalent traveling from say, New York City to Boston (though presumably that would depend on traffic).

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[brausch]

I first heard the station wagon full of tape reference from a co-worker at Pacific Northwest (National) Laboratory in 1985, so the quote predates the Tanenbaum reference by at least a decade.

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[martas]

yeah, i know, and so does wikipedia. now if you know exactly by how much it predates that quote...

Re:oblig. Tanenbaum

[Anonymous Coward]

older, unattributed quote... Never underestimate the bandwidth of an undergraduate with a shopping cart.

upload-upload-upload......

[Anonymous Coward]

why are ISP allowed to use deceptive advertising?

I am sitting right now on a $110us/month RoadRunner [TimeWarner] connection.
Sales is for 6meg down [fair but home is 20meg for much less] but that is not the article - upload is.

So what do I have -------------- 0.5m average to a server located in the same city [speedtest.net] [home has 0.5 for way less $$]

Sad part is that the city has a monopoly - sorry, city fanchise [read get $$] - for TimeWarner so getting something better..........not here.

Not seeing the problem

[khallow]

The comical stunt is designed to raise awareness of the often woeful broadband speed experienced by many people who live in remote and rural parts of their country.

And I should care because? I live in a rural area with woeful broadband speed. So what?

Shipping sometimes works better and cheaper

[pcjunky]

Send 1 Terrabyte of data accross the country..... Cheapest method?...Ship a 1TB hard drive.

Data will arrive sooner and cheaper than any current broadband connection.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes!

Re:Shipping sometimes works better and cheaper

[radish]

I pay ~$60 a month for a connection which gets around 50/25mpbs up/down. So let's say I have the same at each end (CA and NY) and transfer my 1TB, it'll take 3.85 days to transfer at an amortised cost of $15. UPS ground service will cost $10 (plus packing materials) and will take about the same time (4 days) - so I'd call that basically equivalent. To get faster (say, 3 days) it's $20 + materials.

Re:Shipping sometimes works better and cheaper

[pcjunky]

Except your ISP would be calling (booting you)if you tried to transfer that much data on a residential account. Comcast will boot you for more than 250GB. Most ISPs providing residential service have some clause that's something to the effect of accounts showing traffic not typical of residential usage are subject to limiting/termination.

Of course you are assuming that you would get your provided speed when transferring data across the country. Most speed tests I do get slower the farther the test site is from me. I have a 45mbps connection at the office that gets around 35mbps when I test to something within 1k miles of me. Sites on the other coast drop to around 9.

Re:Shipping sometimes works better and cheaper

[dwillden]

Hmm, but If I send my 1tb passport drive via USPS Priority Mail flat rate in their small box, (which has room for packing material to protect the drive.) It would cost $4.95 (less if I pay the shipping on line) to send it on that same route. It should get there in two to three days.

So the box would be quicker, and much cheaper (not counting cost of the external drive) than your pipeline.

Nope the pipeline needs to be even fatter than what you specified to beat transporting physical media.

p.s. You could fit two 1tb passport drives in the specified box.

Re:Shipping sometimes works better and cheaper

[radish]

Yes, but you sent it USPS which is the equivalent of UDP :)

Re:Shipping sometimes works better and cheaper

[geekoid]

lets see:
I upload tr 3 MB per second so just under 4 days.

about the same, and a hell of a lot cheaper.
I pay 25 bucks for 15/10

Pigeons always win at properly set up contests

[wvmarle]

Who wins is depending on how you set your contest. And as this is no more than a publicity stunt, it's of course set up in a way that the pigeon is guaranteed to win.

200 MB on a memory card has the same "transfer time" as 16 GB. Yet suddenly the bandwidth is some 80 times as great.

A 10 Mbit connection has the same transfer speed whether it is to the neighbour's or across the ocean. Oh wait that's downstream; upstream is always slower. On my broadband connection uploading 200 MB will take about 45 minutes - downloading the same amount of data is done within 5 minutes. No wonder you pit the pigeon against an upstream.

And why not ask this pigeon to deliver the video file actually to YouTube? Not to some other point from where it's transferred to YouTube? Is that maybe because YouTube is in the US and that's too far to fly for the pigeon?

TFA admits it: "Also the farms connection speed is just 100-200 Kbps (Kilobits per second), so it never really stood a chance of winning but then that's not the point?". It is set up so the pigeon would win. And 100-200 Kbps up is not even that bad assuming ADSL over normal copper, and farms tend to be far far away from the nearest switch. It's one of those things one will have to live with when trying to live away from the civilised world.

Re:Pigeons always win at properly set up contests

[smallfries]

Who wins is depending on how you set your contest. And as this is no more than a publicity stunt, it's of course set up in a way that the pigeon is guaranteed to win.

200 MB on a memory card has the same "transfer time" as 16 GB. Yet suddenly the bandwidth is some 80 times as great.

No. It's 80 times less. There is no way to read what you've written that fits your argument.

Yes, it was setup to make the pigeon win. That is the purpose of a publicity stunt. But they didn't choose 200MB over 16GB to make it better for the pigeon...

Re:Pigeons always win at properly set up contests

[geekoid]

You call the broad band? you poor bastard.

"And why not ask this pigeon to deliver the video file actually to YouTube?"

Because the point of the stunt was to show how slow rural internet speed is compared to the city?

People like you suck the fun out of things for the pleasure of sucking the fun out of things.

bandwidth

[simoncrute]

That reminds me of the saying "nothing beats the bandwidth of a van full of [insert media of choice] heading down the motorway at 70mph"

The thing is, you can It's much easier to boost the pidgins bandwidth than it is to boost the ADSL. a 2nd 4GB micro SDHC isn't going to slow the pidgin down much..

And the problem isn't just rural broadband. There's loads of suburban areas where you're lucky to get 1Mbit speed especially at peak times, mainly because the local exchange is so far away, and BT can't be bothered to get fiber-to-the-cabinet rolled out any quicker.

dont even bother in canada

[Anonymous Coward]

pigeons will win every time

Larry is Back!

[deceth]

Yes! Finally Larry the remote controlled pigeon is back for another round! Can he still bypass missile defense systems? Have they taken into account the fact that he may stop to dance like in the video? Only time will tell... http://www.looble.com/have-you-met-larry-the-remote-controlled-pigeon/

To help reduce transfer errors

[johno.ie]

Someone should really consider using parroty checks on the data as it arrives.

How many SD cards fit inside a coconut?

[Joce640k]

*That's* bandwidth....

How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[swb]

It should be beyond obvious that some amenities are made economically viable by a large concentration of people, and broadband is one of them.

If it made economic sense (ie, was profitable) to provide those services in rural areas, someone would be doing it. Usually someone *will* provide those services, but not at a cost the end-user will like for casual entertainment use.

Almost always these "rural broadband blows" stories involve around wanting the government to "do something" which usually amounts to a subsidy (my tax money for your service). I generally object to this -- either we end up with a "Universal Service Fee" which is like free money to the telecom providers, as it never goes away, overall higher prices so some mandate can be fulfilled, or some never-ending government bureaucracy like the TVA.

And I think some of this "demand" isn't from 1920s, sepia-tinted people living in rural poverty, but from city people who have made a conscious choice to live in the "country" (thanks to cheap gas) who also want all the amenities of city living but aren't willing to pay for them.

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. It's a marketing decision not an engineering one. Satellite is ridiculous, you get 200MB per day on the MAX plan. Useless for even downloading MacOSX updates. I cannot believe how terrible it is truly. Dialup? You've got to be kidding me, many sites out there don't even test the presentation on 56k connections anymore. (It's about 2 minutes for some pages I frequent, slashdot exempted since I just use slashdot.org/palm when I'm at home.)

Point to point wireless would work, but is not feasible (and my neighbors don't take kindly to much, especially sharin their pornwidth.) Since I'm on an extension of a road off of a county road the telephone carriers won't offer me anything (no facilities) other than POTS. Cable service won't come out here, even with an offer of an easement. It's a bit of a cluster. And no, wifi doesn't work either, it has LESS overall usage available to it than satellite service a 6GB per/mo where VZB and ATT cap you at 4GB and 2GB respectively. That's truly an insult to someone who uses bandwidth as a utility.

Take power, my breaker is fed by a 300amp feed. When I lived in a trailer park it was 30 amps total for the whole unit. That was a 10 times decrease in power available. I made due. However, taking the Cable modem standard of 250GB per month.... well you see how hugely disproportionate that is. Take it to another level and pay for unlimited (yes business grade is unlimited even with Charter/Comcast) and you can easily pull 5TB per mo, if I ran my 56k all month I could get 18Gb.... That's a 99.65 decrease in available bandwidth boys and girls...

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[lamber45]

Not sure if it applies to this particular demand, but the TVA and similar were kept going for as long as they've been around because it makes larger economic sense to have city-driven services available out in the far hinterlands. In the U.S., we have nuclear missle silos uniformly distributed away from populated areas so that a single bomb (terrorist or Russian or North Korean or...) can't cripple the country's capacity to respond. Farmers can use computer-controlled plows, check the futures market up to the last non-frost-free day to decide what to plant, and enroll their kids in distance-education at whatever university has the most-relevant courses, no matter how far away it is. None of that would be possible without roads, electric power and some sort of IP service out in rural areas.

Posting a video to YouTube seems like a silly example; but what if the problem is sending a CAT scan or DNA sequence of a sick cow to a veterinary database, for analysis by specialists? Right now the equipment to gather that data is specialized, but it might be found at an agricultural extension station the farmer could drive to...

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Making economic sense and being profitable are two entirely different things. Providing service can make economic sense, which is to say its economic returns are greater than the cost of providing it, but it might very well not be profitable as the entity providing the service (a telco, for example) might not be able to capture that return.

Hence, it can make perfect sense to subsidize such a service. This is basic economics.

How well that subsidy is implemented is an entirely different problem.

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[Monchanger]

Well that's an easy argument to make, populist and shallow. I'd agree with an argument that lack of access is only a problem when it comes to someone wanting to beat you at [insert currently hot PvP game]. And if that's the only argument, the cost is certainly not worth such limited benefit. But that's a crazy assumption to which you provided no backing for an obvious reason.

The truth is the push for rural broadband isn't about your strawman of entertainment, but about economic development, as even BusinessWeek pointed out. Whether or not R.B. is economically feasible in any specific location is the important question. A question which should not be tainted by the shortsighted and selfish whining of tax haters.

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[DarthVain]

However really government should be kicking ISP ass to get this improved. Creating jobs in rural areas would solve a host of problems, and not having the network to do it for most the types of jobs you could telecommute to or operate whereever you can get people to live is a major hurtle. One might say that the ISP NOT doing this is doing their host countries a huge disservice and harming domestic economics (and considering MOST are state owned or subsided monopolies, not really fair either).

Think high tech jobs in the country, and being able to offer employees reasonable housing costs, and a wonderful environment. However if you do not have the infrastructure to do it, the the company has to, and that is unlikely to happen without huge injection of money from government. So there you go.

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[Anonymous Coward]

My tax money going to something I don't directly benefit from?! Well I never!

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[mmaniaci]

And you forgot to mention that the prices are hiked up and gamed even more than urban services. My parents live up in some mountains and their 3mbs service, if it even works, crawls slower than dialup yet they pay close to $100. I understand that there needs to be a difference between urban and rural internet service due to economical reasons, but the difference is much too great.

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[sa1lnr]

"(thanks to cheap gas)"

This is the UK, we don't do cheap gas.

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[swb]

Many of my relatives live in small town North Dakota (when you look up rural, it says "See North Dakota") and the ones that live "in town" have good broadband and have had it for many years. So yes, you can get high speed internet at home, at school, in business and any other place where you'd realistically expect to have economic development, telemedicine or any of the other things that rural American "needs".

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right. If you grow food for other people to eat for a living you shouldn't expect to have internet access, or TV or electricity either. There are just some things you should sacrifice if you are going to provide a service for others.

Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?"

[16K Ram Pack]

It should be beyond obvious that some amenities are made economically viable by a large concentration of people, and broadband is one of them. If it made economic sense (ie, was profitable) to provide those services in rural areas, someone would be doing it. Usually someone *will* provide those services, but not at a cost the end-user will like for casual entertainment use.

That's my biggest problem. Broadband isn't actually that necessary. Some relatives of mine don't have broadband. They're still on dial-up. They don't use internet much except to book flights or order stuff online. Incidentally, lots of the UK is wired up for broadband. The government and local governments spent money upgrading exchanges to allow for rural areas to be supported. Villages around here with populations of 4,000 and 2,000 that I know have broadband (and ADSL coverage means that you get at least a couple of km of radius of the exchange).You have to be living right in the sticks to not get coverage, which means that wiring those people up costs a huge amount of money per household.

Well, the bandwidth...

[Chris Mattern]

...could be really nice, but the latency is gonna be murder!

Latency

[pr100]

Bandwidth is all very well ... but try winning a game of Quake3 when pigeons are carrying your packets.

Re:Latency

[natehoy]

Could still be useful for loading maps. Who says the two network connections need to be mutually exclusive? Isn't that why you have a QoS flag system in TCP/IP in the first place?

Map loads: High bandwidth desired, high latency acceptable. "Differentiated/Best Effort" chosen. Routing engine chooses pigeon.
Gaming: Low bandwidth desired, low latency acceptable. "Guaranteed" chosen. Routing engine chooses standard broadband.
Email in the background: Low bandwidth desired, high latency acceptable. "Differentiated/Priority" chosen. Routing engine uses connection with the most free capacity at the time.

Eating pigeons?

[allawalla]

I am amazed at the number of pigeon eating jokes. I thought most people in the US consider pigeons as non-edible flying rats. Are the posts all non-US, or have tastes changed?

Re:Eating pigeons?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Are the posts all non-US, or have tastes changed?

It's amazing how an economic downturn can change tastes. In the words of Benjamin Franklin:

"Hunger never knows bad bread."

i don't know how pigeons work

[shadowrat]

I know this is a stunt and all. i don't want to be overly pedantic.However...

i think pigeons are trained to go to one location. ex: if you want to send me data by pigeon, i have to raise pigeons, then give you some of my flock. Those pigeons will come back to me when you let them go.

It simply isn't practical to keep a bunch of pigeons for every destination you would want to go. Even with his slow-ass connection, he can chose to send his data to youtube, or to vimeo, or to some ftp server. It's great that he's got some youtube pigeons that can carry his data to their servers, but what if he wanted to also send the data to an online backup service? he'd really have to factor in the time it takes to have the backup service send him 1 or more of their pigeons before he could affix the storage to them and send them on their way. Probably the worst part about this pigeon system would be everyone interested in consuming his video would need to send their pigeons by truck to the youtube headquarters. There youtube employees would load them with data and release them back to their home. I sort of think even the slow internet connection works better. Plus, packet loss would really be a bitch with this scheme.

Re:i don't know how pigeons work

[Bigjeff5]

It's point to point transfer, like a network trunk.

Re:i don't know how pigeons work

[mrogers]

It simply isn't practical to keep a bunch of pigeons for every destination you would want to go.

Sure, but nor is it practical to run a wire to every destination - that's why we have routers. Same principle here: each pigeon travels one hop, packets are removed from the pigeon and assigned to outgoing pigeons for the next hop, meanwhile the pigeon goes back the other way carrying data in the opposite direction. The 'router' is a wooden box with a solar-powered computer that wirelessly updates the pigeons' memory cards and gives them a treat every round-trip and an extra one at Christmas.

While the situation described in TFA is clearly a stunt, there are actually serious proposals to use vehicle- or animal-based networks for extremely remote areas. NICTA in Australia is working with IIT to develop a delay-tolerant network for rural India, and there's work out there that uses devices attached to animals to collect data from remote environmental sensors. The only limits I can think of on the use of pigeons for such purposes would be the durability of large containers of pigeon treats and the lifetime of the pigeons. Judging by the pigeons here in London, you could addict them to nicotine to solve the former problem, though that might exacerbate the latter...

Re:i don't know how pigeons work

[geekoid]

" i don't want to be overly pedantic"

then don't be.

But you were ss obviously you did want to be pedantic. Do you really think no one else knows that practically this wouldn't work?

Upload

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth noting that they're comparing the pigeon's performance to the broadband's _upload_ performance. The majority of broadband services in the UK are capped at 256 kilobits/sec upload, so in ideal conditions you'd expect it to take around 14 minutes to upload a 200mb file. I mention this because it would be misleading for the results of this test to be presented as a comparison to, say, an "8-meg broadband connection" with lay people mistakenly thinking the file should have uploaded at 8 megabits/sec.

Re:Upload

[ambrosen]

They're probably trying to upload a 200 megabyte(MB) file.

But the cap's up to 2.5Mb/s, so your numbers still work out.

I can't wait

[mattwrock]

Until I can pay $70 a month from Comcast or Time Warner for this Service. Of course they will charge me and additional $10 a month for equipment... er a statue!

Oblig. Script....

[Brit_in_the_USA]

[wind]
[click click]
ARTHUR: Whoa there!
[click click]

GUARD #1: Halt! Who goes there?
ARTHUR: It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, from the castle
of Camelot. King of the Britons, defeator of the Saxons, sovereign
of all England!

ARTHUR: I am. And this my trusty servant Patsy.
We have videoed and photographed the length and breadth of the land in search of knights
who will join me in my court of Camelot. I must speak with your lord
and master.
GUARD #1: What, on film?
ARTHUR: Yes!
GUARD #1: You're using SD cards!
ARTHUR: What?
GUARD #1: You've got two SD cards and you're RAIDing
'em together.
ARTHUR: So? We have ridden since the snows of winter covered this
land, through the kingdom of Mercea, through--
GUARD #1: Where'd you get the SD cards?
ARTHUR: We found them.
GUARD #1: Found them? In Mercea? The SD card is Asian!
ARTHUR: What do you mean?
GUARD #1: Well, this is a temperate zone.
ARTHUR: The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin
or the plumber may seek warmer climes in winter yet these are not
strangers to our land.
GUARD #1: Are you suggesting SD cards migrate?
ARTHUR: Not at all, they could be carried.
GUARD #1: What -- a swallow carrying a SD Card?
ARTHUR: It could grip it by the lock switch!
GUARD #1: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple
question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a 1 pound
SD Card.
ARTHUR: Well, it doesn't matter. Will you go and tell your master
that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here.
GUARD #1: Listen, in order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow
needs to beat its wings 43 times every second, right?
ARTHUR: Please!
GUARD #1: Am I right?
ARTHUR: I'm not interested!
GUARD #2: It could be carried by an African swallow!
GUARD #1: Oh, yeah, an African swallow maybe, but not a European
swallow, that's my point.
GUARD #2: Oh, yeah, I agree with that...
ARTHUR: Will you ask your master if he wants to join my court
at Camelot?!
GUARD #1: But then of course African swallows are not migratory.
GUARD #2: Oh, yeah...
GUARD #1: So they couldn't bring a SD card back anyway...
[click click]
GUARD #2: Wait a minute -- supposing two swallows carried it together?
GUARD #1: No, they'd have to have it on a line.
GUARD #2: Well, simple! They'd just use a standard creeper!
GUARD #1: What, held under the dorsal guiding feathers?
GUARD #2: Well, why not?

Pigeon Bandwidth 4.2Gbit/s or OC-96

[llZENll]

For a 50 mile range a carrier pigeons bandwidth would be 1.9TB per hour. Or 527MB/s or 4.2Gbit/s which is about the same speed as a dedicated OC-96 connection or a Infiniband DDR 1X.

average pigeon flying speed * maximum data it can carry given the current memory technology

Memory:
64GB SD card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139183

"Their average flying speed over moderate distances is around 80 km/h (50 mph),[citation needed] but speeds of up to 125 km/h (75 mph) have been observed"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon

"Well, the link below says 5-10% of the pigeon's weight, or 30-50 grams (1-1.7oz)."
http://interbug.com/pigeon/technology/homing_pigeon_with_gps.pdf

Weight of SD Card
Weight (Approximate): 0.07 oz
make it 0.05oz taking off the plastic enclosure and metal contacts.

1.5oz / 0.05oz = 30 SD memory chips

30 chips * 64GB = The pigeon can carry 1.9TB theoretically.

Previously:
In September 2009, a South African IT company, based in Durban, pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a data packed 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest internet service provider, Telkom. The pigeon named Winston took an hour and eight minutes to carry the data 80 km (50 miles). Including downloading, it took two hours, six minutes, and 57 seconds for the data to arrive, the same amount of time it took to transfer 4% of the data over the ADSL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon

pigeon transfer is not via valid internet protocol

[RichMan]

The simple attachment of the SD card to Pigeon is not RFC1149 compliant

The network transfer includes basic validation of the data transfer at the receivers end. The pigeon method as described does not.
To be fair they should be implementing RFC1149 - Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avia

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

Wrong way to measure speed

[houghi]

Why not use ping and see which one is faster?

RFC Standard

[Dancindan84]

"there isn't a benchmark for pigeon data speeds"

There is, but it used a 64-byte packet. Likely because the standard calls for the packet to be hand written on a piece of paper in Hex. While I'm usually in favour of sticking to standards, I think in this case I'll make an exception.

Pointless ...

[garry_g]

... I can beat just about any digital link with a Semi full of TB-sized harddisks ...
Also, it's not even new ... there's already an RFC for IP over Avian Carriers (RFC 1149) and even with QoS (RFC2549) ...

Is it an advertisement for NetFlix, GameFly, etc?

[CityZen]

The old-school NetFlix, I mean.

piffft!

[random string of num]

massive bandwidth poor latency yada yada next PR stunt please!

Ya, sneaker net always wins

[Sycraft-fu]

If the data sets are large enough and latency not a problem. Doesn't matter how fast your connection is, FedEx is faster at some point. I mean let's say you have a 100mbit connection that really gets that and is dedicated to you. Going full blast 24 hours a day working at its max theoretical speed with no errors, it can transfer just a touch over 1TB per day. Realistically 800-900GB would be all you'd see, even if things were working well. Ok so suppose you have 5TB that needs to be transferred. It'll take a week of hogging up the connection to do that...

Or you could use FedEx. Copy the data on to 3 2TB drives and send them next day air to their destination. It will be there sooner.

We have a research group that does this all the time. They do JPEG2000 (and other) compression research and the data sets are massive. FedEx is faster than the net for the really big ones so they just send off the HDDs. Low tech but extremely effective.

No matter what, this will always be the case. At some level, sneakernet will be faster. What that level is depends on how fast a connection you can sustain between you and your target.

He'll also have to forgive me if I'm not that sympathetic to farmers. You make a choice when you want to live out in the plains. It has many advantages, such as lower land cost, a lot of privacy and so on. However it has disadvantages, one of them being it costs more to deliver high speed access. What's more, farming is a business, so I don't see the problem if they have to pay more to get a business grade Internet line out there. No matter where you are in the US, you can get high speed Internet. However sometimes it is only the most costly kinds of lines, something like a DS-3. For a consumer that is unreasonable, for a business it is not and make no mistake, that's what farming is.

Re:Ya, sneaker net always wins

[10101001 10101001]

He'll also have to forgive me if I'm not that sympathetic to farmers. You make a choice when you want to live out in the plains. It has many advantages, such as lower land cost, a lot of privacy and so on. However it has disadvantages, one of them being it costs more to deliver high speed access.

Quite true. I don't think people who do live in more rural settings believe high speed access has to be 100% identical in cost to more urban settings. The issue is the amount of the discrepancy.

What's more, farming is a business, so I don't see the problem if they have to pay more to get a business grade Internet line out there. No matter where you are in the US, you can get high speed Internet. However sometimes it is only the most costly kinds of lines, something like a DS-3. For a consumer that is unreasonable, for a business it is not and make no mistake, that's what farming is.

Perhaps so, but farmers make up a marginal percentage of the rural population (eg. only 0.7% of the total US population is employed in agriculture yet the Midwest holds about 22% of the US population); however, I think a farmer was used as an example because of the naive presumption that the common rural individual is a farmer. Meanwhile, all sorts of infrastructure (roads, postal or other; electric wires; telephone wires; etc) cost more to roll out in rural areas, yet there's plenty of those things in rural settings. One might believe that most people in rural settings don't want high speed internet (and hence it'd be difficult, if not impossible, to recoup the costs to build that infrastructure), and I'd imagine that might be true today; but, the same argue could have been made before widespread creation of roads and trains when it comes to Midwesterners desiring fresh tropical fruits. Yet, you don't see stores here selling bananas at $6/lb.

In short, I can appreciate your sentiments on the issue, especially when it comes to farmers being businesses. And you do seem to want to differentiate that most non-farmers/non-businesses are not in a position to pay for available high speed internet. I think the real question is, why aren't there more affordable options in rural areas (and by affordable, I mean on the order of at most 2-3x the cost of urban areas) for non-businesses.

Re:Ya, sneaker net always wins

[NeutronCowboy]

He'll also have to forgive me if I'm not that sympathetic to farmers. You make a choice when you want to live out in the plains.

Somehow, I think that farmers don't have much of a choice about living out in the plains. Can you imagine the cost of running a farm in Central Park? If you're a farmer, you're out in the boonies. If you're not, you're growing a vegetable garden.

Re:Ya, sneaker net always wins

[brausch]

He'll also have to forgive me if I'm not that sympathetic to farmers. ...

On the other hand, we all like to eat. It is in our selfish best interest that there be farmers, preferably satisfied with their lot, so that there will continue to be the nice choices at the corner grocery store.

Re:Ya, sneaker net always wins

[Sycraft-fu]

They don't really, but then most of us don't have a choice to live near a city if we want to work where we do. Various choices in life demand tradeoffs. You have to be ok with those. I want to bike to work, which means I have to live in the middle of a city. My parents wanted to live on Vancouver Island which means everything is more expensive since it comes by boat.

I'm not saying we should just say "Fuck farmers," but neither should we be subsidizing the costs of things like their Internet access. It would be the same as saying I should have a subsidy to get a big yard. No, that is a choice I made, where I live land is expensive. I can't afford a yard, that is my choice. Same deal here.

Re:Ya, sneaker net always wins

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter how fast your connection is, FedEx is faster at some point. [...] Copy the data on to 3 2TB drives and send them next day air to their destination.

If you're using FedEx for your connection, at some point your bottleneck becomes the speed at which you can copy the data onto the drives. If your long-distance connection is as fast as your local disk access rate, FedEx is always worse.

Yubba-Dubbah-Dooooo

[Tablizer]

Star Trek shows the future we keep trying to build, but The Flintstones shows the future that actually works.

because it's a "right"

[CannonballHead]

... like health care.

I live in a rural area about 10 minutes from a commuter town which is about 20 minutes from a city of a ~1mil... my broadband is pretty bad. It's line of sight wireless and it's $70/mo for 512k/256k (384 down for $50).

I'm not complaining, I do know where I live and I knew the limitations. But the "pft, move to town, stupid" argument only works if people are not convinced that it's their "right" to have broadband access. With all the recent talk about broadband being like electricity and how we should give everyone access to affordable broadband, etc... I'm not convinced that people realize there are still tradeoffs in life.

It's somewhat similar to health care, too. You don't want to pay for my broadband services due to MY choice of where I live. I don't want to pay for your unhealthy eating habits due to YOUR choice of what you eat.

Of course, there are exceptions all over the place, but you know.

And by the way, us rural folks don't always appreciate those city folks that go live in the "country" ... and then build their multi-million dollar homes with huge lawns (and deep wells to water their huge lawns which they pay gardeners to cut and take away the clippings, as opposed to like ... raising, I don't know, animals on it ...), buy tons of land to do nothing with, etc. But then again, it's a free country, and I'm glad they are just as free to do that as I am to live on it.

Unless, of course, the EPA gets involved because there's an endangered frog that lives on your property. ;)

Re:because it's a "right"

[BJ_Covert_Action]

That's when you shoot the frog and tell the EPA a snake ate the last one. Problem solved.

Re:because it's a "right"

[geekoid]

except the city customer subsidies your connection. A lot.

And I'm OK with that because it's become critical to functioning in society.

Some things ARE critical to a civilized country.

Re:because it's a "right"

[CannonballHead]

except the city customer subsidies your connection. A lot.

Hmmm. How? I pay more than my DSL-equivalent in the city...

HP's Pigeon Net

[woboyle]

Back in the 80's when I was working in the Silicon Valley I knew that HP was using pigeons to fly engineering drawing (as microfilm) from Palo Alto and Cupertino over the mountains to their manufacturing site in Santa Cruz (Grass Valley I think, about 50 miles) on a daily basis. It was cheaper, faster, and more reliable than couriers, US Mail, or package express. Don't know what their "data rates" were, but in the years they used it, until they had a broadband link between sites (probably in the 90's) I only remember hearing of one instance when the "package" didn't get through, likely due to an unfortunate encounter with a hawk or eagle.

How Rural Could it Be???

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the UK-- how rural could it be?? On the Google Maps, it looks like except in hilly areas in Scotland and Wales, everyone is within a few miles of town---

Re:How Rural Could it Be???

[Anne Thwacks]

If its green on Google Maps its rural. Sure it may be only 3 miles from the nearest town, but tis still rural over here!

And yes, BT will probably claim that their pathetic service is because you are in a rural area if you have a tree within sight of your house.

If there is a cow in sight, you are probably only entitled to dial-up.

Could????

[NetNed]

Could the amount of bird hunters the pigeon passes effect it's TTL numbers?

anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but as of 2005, SNAP still beat not only ADSL but "Wi-Fly"
see http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume11/v11i4/sluggish-data-11-4.pdf

Lag in WoW?

[claytonicforce]

As long as I don't get booted from epic raiding.

It's been done

[plopez]

TCP/IP

http://ropata.wordpress.com/2005/06/18/tcpip-traditional-carrier-pigeon-internet-protocol/

Are you moist?

[Tetsujin]

That man in the golden suit just takes things too far, I tell you! But he's sly like a fox...

a flawed study

[swell]

We haven't been considering the content of the 200MB properly. 200 megs of one thing are not necessarily equal to 200 megs of another.

Suppose the farmer in question is Amish and has no interest in 200MB of HD video entertainment. What if he is transmitting medical data on his pigs or his tax report or some highly encrypted Amish prøn? See what I mean?

And how is the pigeon motivated by the contents it is carrying? Would a massive spreadsheet or heavy PowerPoint document carry the same incentive as a hot Brittney video or a lightweight Slashdot Idle story? Now which is faster?

To be unbiased, the test should include several types of data. This kind of study cannot be accurately performed on a tight budget. A well considered government funded study should be promptly implemented.

Terrible latency

[w0mprat]

and pigeons literally drop packets.

ERROR

[BigSes]

Gk6k0#!>3_p

NO CARRIER (pigeon)

Stupid Experiment

[UndeadCircus]

Are they expecting any serious results from this experiment? Sure, they say it's a joke, but at least have something meaningful behind it if you're going to call out something as big as the broadband carriers. If not, why not try and send a 50GB clip? Why not send a 5TB clip? Even some of the best connections here in the US wouldn't be able to upload something that's 5TB before a pigeon could deliver it somewhere else. This is a stupid experiment.

ok.. here goes.

[KingRatMass]

75 years ago, this was a decisive element of the Allied campaign from D-day through the crossing of the Rhine. Signal Corp units carried cages of pigeons homed to coops in London for message transmission back to Allied High Commond to avoid signal interception. Once a pigeon is born, it's homed to a coop... Route persistence with absolutely no way to corrupt the routing table. Pigeon retain their ability to find their home coop even if they've been away from it for years. The signal transmission is virtually unsniffable, the only way to intercept the message is to destroy the transport. Homing pigeons in flight to their home coop are NOT like the feral pigeons you see in a city park... They are 50mph missles that are very hard to track and eliminate. Using high quality bred transports, like Janssens or Husken Van Riels would increase speed, distance and reliability. Each hub could support a inward star topology of 1 to 3000 miles in diameter. Smaller diameter stars would reduce data loss and increase speed marginally. With their many to one topology, they can be used in multicast mode if several birds from different home coops are released from the same location. Overall data losses would be low, approximately 2% to 5% of all data packages sent would be lost. Raptors and inclement weather would be the leading causes for data loss. Pigeons have a very low operating cost, feed and water and a place to roost... Significantly lower than any petro based transport like station wagon or plane. They also have a service lifespan on 5 to 10 years. Now add to that the Green element, pigeons have a minuscule carbon footprint, they eat grain that can be cultivated locally and their waste makes excellent fertilizer to sustain grain production. You can't forget the fact that they are a source of meat once their usefulness as a carrier expires.