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Pigeon Turns Out To Be Faster Than S. African NetComments:406
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Sep 10, 2009 06:57 AM
from the fast-and-pigeon-fast dept.
from the fast-and-pigeon-fast dept.
inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."
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Pigeons RULE! (Score:4, Funny)
Suck it, non-pigeons.
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
Patent application granted to "Telkom Communications" for a "method for transmitting data via avian carrier", even though lots of prior art exists.
An unfair comparison (Score:5, Funny)
I fear that this might have been an unfair comparison, though. The pigeon was, after all, dedicated to only that one transfer.
For a more apples-to-apples comparison with most companies' networks, the pigeon should also be transporting:
- a porn DVD or two
- half the collection of lolcat movies on youtube
- and half the collection of funny clips
- a periodic refresh of Slashdot, in 1 second intervals.
- an IRC session on sexnet for the network admin. Logging connections doesn't apply to him, after all. You can contact him under the nickname Linda1991 faster than through the internal channels.
- a couple of managers' correspondence with the distressed widdow of a nigerian prince. Hey, they're only trying to help her.
- a trojan download or two, from those guys in marketing who got admin rights on their computer because they can't work without it. And now can't work without the latest animated gizmo off www.i-pwn-your-machine.ru.
- the keylogger traffic in the other direction from the couple more who already downloaded it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes but this was just ONE packet, I am sure you can fit more than one pigeon into the air ;)
Re:An unfair comparison (Score:4, Funny)
If your network uses 4 GB packets, I fear that you might not get much advanced out of the whole packet switching concept :p
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sure you can send more packets but you're still getting a 7200000ms ping.
Good luck finding a Quake server which won't kick you.
Re:An unfair comparison (Score:5, Funny)
Absolutely. The air is just one big tube.
However, I wonder if it would be faster to just dump a bunch of carrier pigeons on a truck instead and transfer the data that way?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course it's unfair. You can get a *LOT* of data on a flash card nowadays. They're selling 8 GB cards at the store I'm standing in for $25. And a pidgeon could easily carry 4 of these. Go 16 GB cards, same size, double the capacity.
It's the common confusion of speed vs latency. Speed is how much you can cram through the pipe in a given period, and at this, pigeons excel.
Latency is end-to-end, unloaded communication lag, and this is where pigeons do very poorly.
Stunts like this one purposely confuse the tw
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I must applaud the IT company for trying out a 'green' alternative to large volume data transfer, but I wonder how long it will take for Telkom to get new legislation passed that will outlaw this form of data transfer.
Re:Pigeons RULE! (Score:4, Funny)
If you're asking for me to pay the up front fee, I will do so. Via avian carrier. A recent experiment shows that it's more effective than internet based communications.
Re:Pigeons RULE! (Score:5, Funny)
For the love of God, just don't try to send any data throgh it's secure socket...
Re:Pigeons RULE! (Score:4, Funny)
Pigeons are a series of tubes.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But it still does not answer the question (Score:3, Funny)
What's the speed of an unloaden African swallow?
Re:But it still does not answer the question (Score:4, Funny)
The european swallows what?
Loads.
Not a fair comparison (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not a fair comparison (Score:5, Funny)
Not only that, but his assistant kept touching my wife's ass, and after he wrapped up his sales presentation and left, we noticed all the silverware was gone. I'd advise all to keep well away from these carrier pigeon vendors, even if they seem slick.
Cloud computing (Score:5, Funny)
This give a new meaning to "cloud computing". Just look at the clouds to see the results coming in!
Take that! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Take that! (Score:5, Funny)
It's the logfiles!
My professor used to say (Score:5, Insightful)
Never underestimate the datarate of a truck loaded with CDs. The latency is a bitch, though.
Seems the same applies to pigeons with flash cards.
Underwater Fiber (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet speed is expected to improve once a new 17,000 km underwater fiber optic cable linking southern and East Africa to other networks becomes operational
I thought this "contest" measured the speed of an internal data transfer within SA.
Its official... (Score:5, Funny)
Not really all that surprising these days (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well of course it's faster (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well of course it's faster (Score:4, Insightful)
If you email it most likely your email server rejects it, at that point you try FTP which sucks because the remote office around the world has a terrible link speed and your outgoing FTP is throttled so you suggest to your IT department that you set up bittorrent at the offices with fast connections because this data must be transferred weekly. Finally after 3 weeks of back and forth you settle for the post office because while everyone including your boss has come up with 5 better solutions than mail the IT guys refuse to implement any of them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Loss (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a nice demo of pigeon power, but did they think about pigeon packet loss ? I'm sure it'll be a little more important than cable packet loss
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You mean hawks?
Re:Loss (Score:5, Funny)
The carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance system, which increases availability.
Because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss of a carrier can be tolerated. With time, the carriers are self-regenerating. Audit trails are automatically generated, and can often be found on logs and cable trays.
Pigeons Vs. The Clacks (Score:3, Funny)
too bad animaniacs is off the air (Score:5, Interesting)
Would have made a good premise for a Goodfeathers episode.
PTAM (Score:3, Informative)
With 16GB micro SD cards, the statement holds true even today.
Yes, if latency is not a factor (Score:4, Insightful)
What about latency? Surely it is orders of magnitude larger with pigeons than with even worst possible fiber connections? We are talking minutes versus tens to hundreds of a second. Something anybody with knowledge on networks knows already. Then again, since for most IT companies bandwidth is more important than latency, I guess pigeons make more sense to them. In fact, that is what I would have used. Every time I had to send a gigabyte of media data back when I was in advertisement media business, I wish I had remembered about pigeons. So, for any case where latency is not a factor, pigeons rule. In all other cases however we need any kind of fiber.
Re:Yes, if latency is not a factor (Score:5, Funny)
Well, yeah, you're not likely do do VoPTP (Voice over Pigeon Transfer Protocol) or play an online game using pigeons as packet carriers. The latency is bad. But this was a POC (Pigeon of Concept) that will lead to an RFC (Request Flying Carrier) and eventually it will go Beta (Birds Enabling Telecommunications Applications).
Haha (Score:3, Funny)
50 Win points (TM) to whoever tagged this "half-duplex"
Hawks (Score:5, Funny)
A major source of packet loss...
Telkom could not immediately be reached... (Score:4, Funny)
From the article:
Well, that's because you used email. If you'd sent it pigeon post, it would have got through!
stupid point to make (Score:4, Insightful)
I could transfer 4gb faster by tossing an SD card across the room than I could by sending it over our LAN, that doesn't mean the LAN is bad, or slow, it just means that "a Truck full of harddrives has more bandwidth than the whole of the internet"[admitting that "whole of the internet" is a meaningless term in terms of bandwidth]- point being that bandwidth isn't everything
What... (Score:4, Funny)
Obligatory RFCs (Score:3, Informative)
RFC1149 - Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html [faqs.org]
RFC2549 - IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html [faqs.org]
One would hope (Score:5, Insightful)
that training and money went into creating this network that cannot keep up with a pigeon.
Re:In defense of the cable... (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple of important things were omitted that are important to the pigeon - in particular the time and money that went into training the bird to make that flight. They didn't exactly just reach out of their office window and grab any pigeon that happened to be nearby.
I don't think thats important at all. Its not like they reached out the window, and grabbed any phone line either. This was simply comparing quality of service between two provider's networks. Telekom lost.
Re:In defense of the cable... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In defense of the cable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Homing pigeons are not trained. Their ability is innate [wikipedia.org].
Kind of true, but training helps, that's why pigeon racing is a sport - different training methods produce different results (though breeding helps too, of course). In war, they were often trained to find a "moving home"... an ability that is certainly needs training
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What if you just strapped one pigeon onto another pigeon? Each pigeon goes one direction. Thus if we strap two pigeons together we have a bidirectional avian connection. The future is now.
Re:This is useless reporting (Score:4, Informative)
From the /. article also linked in the summary:
"Just a few days after this Slashdot article, South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service), is being pitted against a homing pigeon to see which can deliver 4GB of call centre data logs quickest over a distance of around 80km (50 miles). According to the official website, the race is set to take place September 10."
You can calculate the speed and it's damning (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, we know it was 4 GB and that in 2 hours the Telekom transferred only 4% of that data. Let's say approximately 4000 MB for ease of calculation. A whole 4% of that is 160 MB transferred in two hours.
Now bytes are not bits, and network speeds are usually specified in megabits per second. Allowing for handshake, headers, etc, and again going just for a rough ballpark figure, I'll take x10 for the bytes to bits conversion.
So it's 1600 megabits in 7200 seconds. 1600 / 7200 = 0.22 megabit / sec.
Honestly, even ADSL upload speeds in the western world tend to be better than that.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)