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."
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.
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This should invalidate all wireless communications patents, right? ;)
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.
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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
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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?
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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
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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...
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Just do not try to play Quake over it.
Re:Pigeons RULE! (Score:4, Funny)
Pigeons are a series of tubes.
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For the love of God, just don't try to send any data throgh it's secure socket...
This has been tried, but the pigeon's "secure" socket is not as "secure" as you would think. First of all it only holds a tiny amount of data, and secondly, there's a vulnerability which can cause your data to be dropped on random objects including statues, cars and people.
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But it still does not answer the question (Score:3, Funny)
What's the speed of an unloaden African swallow?
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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 d
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The card that 4GB on it (pidgeon) and took 1 Hour. The DSL line transfered 4% of that (163.84MB) in 2 hours (double the time) before I'm assuming they gave up and cancelled the upload.
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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 th
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Which would require a 5 megabit upload rate. There aren't many people on this planet that can get a domestic service that does that - even businesses would find it expensive. Best I could get here is a 4 Megabit, if a progressive company would put equipment in the local exchange.
Re:But it still does not answer the question (Score:4, Funny)
The european swallows what?
Loads.
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According to some of the films I've seen, she swallows ANYTHING...
Not a fair comparison (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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I wish I had mod points. It's not every day I can laugh before 9:00a.
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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.
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If full-duplex is all you care about, a dial-up line will suffice. But if you want high-bandwidth, pigeons is clearly the way to go in South Africa.
I'm looking forward to a follow-up three-way race that includes bongo drums.
Cloud computing (Score:5, Funny)
This give a new meaning to "cloud computing". Just look at the clouds to see the results coming in!
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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.
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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.
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More to the point: I'd like to see that pigeon deliver a single byte of information 17,000km away!
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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.
Its official... (Score:5, Funny)
Not really all that surprising these days (Score:5, Insightful)
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According to the story the ISP delivered only 4% of the data in the one hour the pigeon took to deliver all of it. That would be 720Kbps by your figures.
Never thought the day would come... (Score:2)
Next up in news... (Score:2)
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.
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How exactly to in-house IT guys implement a fatter pipe? You can't create more bandwidth locally.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Tanenbaum, Andrew S.
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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
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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.
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Pigeons Vs. The Clacks (Score:3, Funny)
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God knows what effect it would have on soil in large enough quantity.
too bad animaniacs is off the air (Score:5, Interesting)
Would have made a good premise for a Goodfeathers episode.
Ironic /. Quote (Score:2)
Interestingly, the /. quote at the bottom of the page when I was reading this story was:
It's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon. -- Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"
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).
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play an online game using pigeons as packet carriers.
You can if you're a falconer...
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They generally use motorbike couriers for that sort of thing. They can carry about 10TB or so of data. Time taken depends on traffic and distance.
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Humans want money for everything. Pigeons don't. They are cheap in getting and owning :p They're also cute and assuming they don't become disease carriers, are good pets.
Haha (Score:3, Funny)
50 Win points (TM) to whoever tagged this "half-duplex"
Bollocks (Score:2)
In a (very) rough calculation I worked out that if they sent an 8GB card, then their net connection was a little over 43Kbps. I don't think even SA has stuck to modem implemented internet, so I would say they were probably sending more than 8GB.
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Never underestimate... (Score:2)
Just an improved version... (Score:2, Informative)
Already been tried and tested....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
Hawks (Score:5, Funny)
A major source of packet loss...
African or European? (Score:2)
You've got two empty halves of coconuts and you're bangin' 'em together!
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
Oh, the irony... (Score:2, Funny)
Make some money! (Score:2)
Now all I have to do , is capture and train all the pigeons here in my downtown area, move to Africa, and start my own carrier pigeon company for all those interested in saving money and also having quicker file transfers, and I will be filthy rich!
Seriously though, it speaks volumes that a pigeon can carry a card with data faster then we can download...oh wait, this is in Africa,
so I guess its because its still a 3rd world country???
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...)
This is nothing new... (Score:2)
Sneaker net has always had the highest bandwidth recorded. Want to send 10 TB of data across the world? Would you try uploading it to their server, or sending 5 2TB hard drives by Fed Ex? Which one do you think will get there faster?
People have been doing this for quite some time.
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.
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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
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>>>>>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 re
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
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so you just have one pigeon from the other office boxed up with your memory stick. the first pigeon arrives, you take the other office's pigeon out of the box, take the memory stick, put in a new memory stick, put your pigeon in the box, attach the box to the previously boxed pigeon, and send him back from whence it came.
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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.
In defense of the pigeon (Score:2)
Besides, I'm sure you can just buy a carrier pigeon nowadays... this is not the 15th century anymore you know...
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You are saying it as if if you had to snap a random group of IP packets you actually knew what to do with them? Infrastructure always has to be in place.
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Not to mention that pigeon bittorrent implementation is a bit cumbersome.
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Furthermore, when you look at throughput for physical transportation, you have to factor in the impact of deadheads (moving an empty truck, plane, or messageless pigeon somewhere so it can pick up a load). In the case of carrier pigeons, they just fly toward home, so if you want to send another message you're going to have to carry them back to the source by some other means of transportation which likely takes much longer than the pigeons flight. Averaging in the return trip, the crummy network is going to
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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.
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I would except the gentleman with mod points was being ironic. Whoosh.