Slashdot Mirror
Australia Cockatoos Chew Billion-Dollar Broadband (bbc.com)
Australia's multimillion dollar broadband network is under attack -- from cockatoos. From a report: The National Broadband Network (NBN) company said it has spent tens of thousands of dollars so far fixing cables chewed by the birds. Australian broadband is already criticised for being slow. According to a recent report it ranks 50th in the world for internet speed. NBN estimates the bill will rise sharply as more damage is uncovered. In an attempt to improve Australia's internet speed -- currently lagging behind many developed countries at 11.1 megabits per second -- a national telecommunications infrastructure project has been instigated and is due for completion in 2021. But engineers returning to sites have found spare cables chewed and frayed. The culprits are cockatoos, a type of parrot which normally eats fruit, nuts, wood and bark.
Whoa, tens of thousands of whole dollars? Sounds like a major problem.
Ah, finally a production implementation of RFC-2549...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If the birds’ poop didn’t spawn radioactive nanobots then I consider that a win.
This is not a new problem, while working for the then Telecom Australia in the early 8o'S, the same used to happen to analog wires and cables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
FTFA:
"The Hungry Beast team had read about the South African experiment and assumed that as a developed western country, Australia would have higher speeds. The experiment had the team transfer a 700MB file via three delivery methods to determine which was the fastest: A carrier pigeon with a microSD card, a car carrying a USB Stick, or a Telstra (Australia's largest telecom provider) ADSL line. The data was to be transferred from Tarana in rural New South Wales to the western-Sydney suburb of Prospect, New South Wales, a distance of 132 km by road. Approximately halfway through the race the internet connection unexpectedly dropped and the transfer had to be restarted, the pigeon won the race with a time of approximately 1 hour 5 minutes, the car came in second at 2 hours 10 minutes, while the internet transfer did not finish, having dropped out a second time and not coming back. The estimated time to upload completion at one point was as high as 9 hours, and at no point did the estimated upload time fall below 4 hours.[12]
"
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
And I hear snowcocks can be a handful too.
Some folks I know in Australia describe the cockatoos there as amazingly destructive. They travel in flocks, and will occasionally settle on some poor somebody's roof and rip half of the shingles off, just for fun. TFA is no surprise to me.