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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."
Are these African or European pigeons?
I bet they're lousy for gaming.
What is the bandwidth capacity of an unladen swallow?
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
There's an RFC for it!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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.
now threatened by falcons and pigeon shooters. OTOH, how do you perform Deep Packet inspection on those ?
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
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...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Sure, data throughput can be pretty awesome, but exchanging public keys must be a bitch.
...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.
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.)
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
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
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.
Monstar L
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.
weinersmith
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.
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.
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
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.
... 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. ;)