Pigeon Carries Data 25 Times Faster Than South Africa’s Telkom

A South African information technology company chose a novel way to prove how slow the country’s leading Internet service provider Telkom was, they strapped a memory card to a pigeon and had a data transfer race.
Winston, an 11-month-old pigeon flew from Unlimited IT’s Pietermaritzburg offices to Durban, a distance of 80km. The flight took one hour and eight minutes.
When the time it took to transfer the data to and from the memory card was added to the flight time, the total was two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds. At completion of the pigeon-carried transfer, the Telkom download was only 4% of the way through.
[Reuters]







4%, WOW, WHAT AN IMPROVEMENT, AND THAT FOR ADSL, WAY TO GO TELKOM!!!
Yeah… but how much data was it?
We have since learned that it was 4GB
So what you’re saying is that the Internet would be better designed as a shipping service instead of a series of tubes?
No, what we are saying is that an avian data delivery system is more efficient than South Africa’s leading tube-based data delivery system.
So what they’re saying it took almost an HOUR to copy 4GB of data to and from the stick?! What kind of computer did they use?!
..or did they calculate the time strapping the stick onto the bird, walk it outside and on the other side catch it, etc?
I think the latter. It was an end-to-end calculation.