Pigeon Turns Out To Be Faster Than S. African Net 406
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."
Re:But it still does not answer the question (Score:2, Informative)
That was no ISP (Score:2, Informative)
That was Telekom, the government owned telephone and internet semi-monopoly.
They don't have to compete.
40 years ago it was put your name on a list and wait up to five years to get a (wired) phone.
Now it's put your data on the wires and wait for it to get delivered.
But I wonder why I can get to SA web sites and search engines like brabys.co.za and ananzi.co.za fairly quickly.
Re:In defense of the cable... (Score:5, Informative)
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."
PTAM (Score:3, Informative)
With 16GB micro SD cards, the statement holds true even today.
Re:But it still does not answer the question (Score:2, Informative)
What's the speed of an unloaden African swallow?
Replacing "speed" with "data rate" and making a few other substitutions, we have a question I find interesting. "What was the data rate of that particular laden African swallow?"
The story is missing an absolutely critical piece of info though - how much data there was. Without that knowledge, the story is pretty meaningless. If I transport 30 GB of data by thumb drive physically (whether by pigeon or car or whatever) in an hour, I can get it there far faster than my home cable modem. If it was 1 MB of data, it's a very different story.
Judging by the fact that the time "including download" to the destination system was about an hour longer than the time it took for the pigeon to fly, I'd say it very well could have been at least a few GB.
For sake of a wild-ass guess, giving, say, 20 min overhead for fumbling around with the data card, putting it on and off the pigeons leg, etc., and dividing the remaining time by two (1 transfer onto and 1 transfer off of the device), that puts each transfer at around 15-18 min. At 20 MB/sec, it could have been around 18 to 21 GB of data being transferred. That translates (under the aforementioned massive and barely justifiable set of assumptions) to about 2.3 to 2.8 megabytes per second moved by pigeon (20-ish GB moved in 7617 seconds).
I'm not going to waste (more) time analyzing sensitivity to changes in my assumptions, but at a guess I'd say the result is moderately sensitive to changes in both pigeon-to-computer transfer time and pigeon-to-computer data rates. In other words, take the numbers above with a pretty big grain of salt.
Just an improved version... (Score:2, Informative)
Already been tried and tested....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
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:An unfair comparison (Score:2, Informative)
South Africans just do not do that, at least not in great numbers. It is too expensive. And as for downloading DVD's, it's almost cheaper just to buy the original [copy off a street vendor..]
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]
Re:An unfair comparison (Score:2, Informative)