SA's Largest Telecomms Provider vs. a Pigeon

dagwud writes "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."

Doesn't mention their monopoly

[LordAndrewSama]

South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service)

It should be mentioned that they have a monopoly on landlines and that's why they're still the largest despite all the flak. 39% state owned, and ICASA(south africa's communications regulator) is practically telkoms bitch.

My money is on the pigeon

[wvmarle]

In their trial run, the pigeon took 48 mins to transfer 4 GB of data. That is a sustained 12 Mb. Quite a decent speed, even for a 80-km link that they are renting for roughly USD 6000 per month.

The show-down is set for tomorrow (Wed 9 Sep) so we even don't have to wait long for the final results!

Re:Telkom play fair?

[wvmarle]

RTFA: they had a trial (pigeon won), got in the news, quickly got a call from the telco's rep to get their circuit number so telco could make sure they had good service. Fair? Well not as long as telco is not giving them more bandwidth than they are supposed to have... in which case telco is just doing their job (which they are obviously not doing now). The best part of the article is the implicit suggestion to switch from ADSL to pigeons: the blogger claims they would save more than 80% cost compared to the existing line, or about USD 4600 per month savings.