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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."
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.
I'm guessing zero.
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.)
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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.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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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.
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.
Depending on the roads, it could well be 84 miles by road but substantially less as the pigeon flies.
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.
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Is there conversion rate from pigeon to station wagon?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
The big surprise is that the station wagon went obsolete before the magnetic tape, which is still the preferred method of bulk backup.
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?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
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.
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.
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