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."
Old News (Score:1, Insightful)
RFC2549 - IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service [faqs.org]
One would hope (Score:5, Insightful)
that training and money went into creating this network that cannot keep up with a pigeon.
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.
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.
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.
Not really all that surprising these days (Score:5, Insightful)
Well of course it's faster (Score:5, 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: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
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:Not a fair comparison (Score:2, Insightful)
Huh? You can't send pigeons both ways at the same time? As far as I know, you can pipeline pigeons too. I guess if you're talking about the one pigeon it's not gonna "home" both ways, but one data packet doesn't go both ways on an electronic network either.
Re:In defense of the cable... (Score:2, 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.
My point is that the time and money invested in the bird is not trivial. If the pigeon is to carry something to point B from point A, someone needs to deliver the pigeon from point B to point A in order for that to happen. And that person will then themselves return to point B (if they live or work at point B) or else they originated at point A (if they live or work there). Hence there is a round trip by car (or other vehicle) for someone between A and B that should be considered. That round trip took time and money for someone. And the bird likely wasn't free either.
Though nonetheless, the data transfer rates over cable were atrocious, as shown in the summary.
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.
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
PR stunt (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is everybody discussing the technical validity of using pigeons to transfer data? (except of course to generate semi-interesting puns and whatnot)
It is a PR stunt to get more non-technical people to take note of Telkom's practices putting a brake on parts of our economy. (nevermind the breaks our "government" is putting on...)
Re:But it still does not answer the question (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed - the problem here is conflating bandwidth with latency.
The fact that offline methods can have higher bandwidth is nothing new or surprising - just shove a hard drive in the post or whatever, as you suggest, or for even more dramatic examples, the classic is a van or jumbo jet full of DVDs/hard drives.
There's nothing here that suggests the S African network is slow. Indeed, even on my home wifi, I can trivially move a hard drive, thumb drive or flash card between my two computers, much faster than the time it takes to transmit it through the network. A pigeon could too.
When we talk about networks being "fast" compared with offline methods, it's the latency we're talking about - how long does it take for a given piece of information to be transmitted?
Re:An unfair comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes but this was just ONE packet, I am sure you can fit more than one pigeon into the air ;)
Re:Well of course it's faster (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In defense of the cable... (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>>>God you dense.
>>Your typing leaves something to be desired.
It's not a typo or grammatical error. It's Ebonics. ;-)
.
>>>I never suggested such a thing, you made it up based on how you (mis)read what I wrote.
I understood perfectly. You basically said "in defense of cable" that it was cheaper than training pigeons, which is more costly in time and money.
Now you're trying to backpeddle and pretend you never said that, but it seems quite clear - you forgot laying cable ALSO requires traiining and money and time.
Right now I'm leaning towards the pigeon being cheaper. It's certainly faster (about 50 times faster).