Carrier Pigeon Faster Than South-African Broadband
Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Thu 10th Sep 2009 20:45 UTC
Humor In an attempt to show just how slow South Africa's Telkom broadband is, a frustrated IT company had a race to see which would be faster: transferring 4GB by sending a USB drive via pigeon 60 miles away, or transferring the files via the broadband connection. There were even rules in place so as to not have any unfair advantage over the broadband such as "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within." It was faster to send the data by pigeon than by broadband. It took the bird about an hour to reach the recipient station, and it took another hour to transfer the data to the other computer. The file being transferred via the broadband connection was still at 4%. Telkom said that it is not responsible for the firm's slow Internet speed. Winston, the bird, is safely back in the IT office, probably enjoying birdseed without any performance-enhancing caplets mixed in.
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Heh
by 3rdalbum on Fri 11th Sep 2009 10:22 UTC
3rdalbum
Member since:
2008-05-26

You're looking at a round-time ping of 720000ms. The bandwidth is pretty good, but the latency sucks.

Reply Score: 3

RE: Heh
by Hypnos on Sat 12th Sep 2009 05:44 in reply to "Heh"
Hypnos Member since:
2008-11-19

You're looking at a round-time ping of 720000ms. The bandwidth is pretty good, but the latency sucks.

Can't help myself:

1. You're missing a zero.

2. And the round-time ping is twice that, as it took the pigeon two hours just to get there.

Nonetheless, your point is well-taken -- this is more a publicity stunt than particularly relevant to how most people use broadband (e.g., web browsing).

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[2]: Heh
by 3rdalbum on Sat 12th Sep 2009 09:58 in reply to "RE: Heh"
3rdalbum Member since:
2008-05-26

"You're looking at a round-time ping of 720000ms. The bandwidth is pretty good, but the latency sucks.

Can't help myself:

1. You're missing a zero. "

So I am. I feel like a bit of a tool.

2. And the round-time ping is twice that, as it took the pigeon two hours just to get there.


The OSnews summary says the pigeon took an hour to reach the destination, and a (hotly-disputed) hour to transfer the data off the USB stick. If you were looking at a round-time ping, then it would be two hours for travelling and a couple of seconds to mount the drive and read/write a couple of bytes.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE: Heh
by cyberix on Sat 12th Sep 2009 08:43 in reply to "Heh"
cyberix Member since:
2008-06-25

Exactly!

This is the first thing they teach on our data communication classes at University of Helsinki. You can get insane bandwidth by moving disks on a truck.

Then the story continues on the peer-to-peer course by explaining that moving disks by walking is a peer-to-peer network with rather good bandwidth.

Online peer-to-peer file-sharing systems are then built to solve the problem of figuring out who has what. They also make moving content around cheaper, as you don't have to be walking around moving disks.

Reply Parent Score: 1