Pigeon Turns Out To Be Faster Than S. African Net

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."

In defense of the cable...

[damn_registrars]

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.

too bad animaniacs is off the air

[jollyreaper]

Would have made a good premise for a Goodfeathers episode.

Re:Not really all that surprising these days

[delt0r]

Well I get the same upload too. But yes generally thats true. I have to pay an extra 10EU per month to have the same upload as download speed.

4GB packets - don't laugh

[davidwr]

The post office is a packet-switched network, where the packets are known as letters or parcels. A DNA sample sent through the mail may contain well more than 4GB in a single "packet."

For electronic packet-switched networks, there may be some applications where a 4GB packet is appropriate. If the cost of resending lost packets is very low even fi the packet size is huge and the overhead cost per packet is high but fixed per packet, a larger packet size might be in order. Maybe not 4GB, but very likely more than the typical ~1.5Kb for most LAN networks.

Re:An unfair comparison

[mcrbids]

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 two issues.