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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

Ping times?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet they're lousy for gaming.

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?

[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.

What is your name? What is your quest?

[Ukab the Great]

What is the bandwidth capacity of an unladen swallow?

No standard for pigeon data speeds?

[jez9999]

There's an RFC for it!

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

[DarthVain]

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

Encryption

[Nautical Insanity]

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

Dropped pigeon packets?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not good a good user experience....

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...

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.

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: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: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: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: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

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.