Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery - but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.
A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.
Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.
Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds.
The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.
He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.
"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's Kevin Rolfe told the Beeld newspaper.
3 comments:
The computer gurus are well aware of the advantages of pigeons. Way back on April 1, 1990 they issued
RFC1149 - Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
followed up on April 1, 1999 by
RFC2549 - IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html
This kind of thing has history - a guy called James Boren has done a similar thing a couple of times in the USA. From his website:-
In 1972 Jim ran a 170 mile race with the U.S. Mail (from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.). Using six quarterhorses, his Pony Express beat all the U.S. Mail...some of it by as much as 8 days. In 1991 he repeated the race... from Muskogee, OK, to Tahlequah, OK, (25 miles by road). Jim didn't take the beaten path. This time, the mail was carried by canoe, by joggers running backwards, clog dancers, waltzers, and a group of Native Americans. The final leg of the race was run with a herd of turtles. His Turtle Express won...even after giving the Postal Service 24 hours bonus time. This race was featured in the April 1995 issue of Smithsonian Magazine."
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