Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Thu 10th Sep 2009 20:45 UTC
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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Features
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2008-05-26
Can't help myself:
1. You're missing a zero. "
So I am. I feel like a bit of a tool.
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.