SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'

[Skandi]

Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery - but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

more (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8248056.stm)

[SwordoftheVistula]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pigeon-flies-faster-broadband-internet,8635.html

What's next? BirdTorrent?

Carrier pigeons are an ancient way to transmit information. As we've seen in many movies, one would tie a small scrolled message to the leg of a pigeon before sending it flapping off to warn its recipient of impending danger.

Today we have much more modern and efficient ways to transmit information… or do we? If you're an internet user in South Africa on the Telkom ISP, you might have better results with the old ways.

A worker at a Durban IT company was very unhappy with the performance of Telkom's ADSL speed. As a result, he decided to pit a carrier pigeon armed with a 4 GB USB stick against a plain file transfer.

Winston the pigeon won.

By the time Winston reached his destination, only 4 percent of the file had transferred. The BBC report does not specify the full size of the file, but did say that Winston completed his journey in 1 hour and 8 minutes, while the internet transfer required an additional hour to complete.

ISP Telom said that it couldn't be held responsible for the slow transfer speeds to the IT company, as it has helped to advise the company in possible improvements, but thus far none have been accepted.

[RoyBatty]

Telkom, the SA telecoms monopoly, is known amongst locals as Hellkom for obvious reasons. :D