Now I know what my friend Leon is talking about when he complains about slow Internet speeds in Durban, South Africa.
A company in South Africa, annoyed with the slow ISP connectivity available, decided to stage a race between their ISP and a carrier pigeon, to see which was a faster method of transferring 4GB of call center data logs to their branch office 80km away.
Not only that, but it blew their ISP away. In the two hours, six minutes, 57 seconds it took to complete the data transfer (one hour eight minutes flight time, plus uploading, downloading, etc), their ISP (Telkom) managed to transfer only 4% of the data. For this particular application, that’s 1/25 of a pigeonbaud, I suppose.
As Andrew S. Tanenbaum famously noted, “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”
…Or, apparently, of a homing pigeon carrying an SD card. And this one wasn’t even highly motivated!
