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Pigeon beats broadband in data transfer race

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 10 Sep 2009 at 10:59

A company has become so disgruntled with its slow broadband connection, that's it begun transferring large files via homing pigeon.

In a very tortoise and hare story, a financial services company based in Durban, South Africa pitted a homing pigeon carrying 4GB of data on a USB stick against its broadband connection to find out which would be faster transferring the data between its two offices 80km apart.

The homing pigeon, named Winston, arrived with the USB stick in two hours and seven minutes, just as the download hit 4% complete. The company believes Winston can be trained to deliver the data in 45 minutes, a significant boost over its ropey broadband connection.

"For years we've struggled with the internet as a method of communication. It's fine for e-mails and correspondence, but we need to transfer a lot of data from one office to another and find it often lets us down," the company's chief executive Kevin Rolfe tells the Metro. "If we get bad weather and the service goes down it can up to two days to get through."

Winston is vulnerable to the weather and predators such as hawks. Obviously he will have to take his chances

However, he admits the plan is not without its difficulties: "There are other problems, of course. Winston is vulnerable to the weather and predators such as hawks. Obviously he will have to take his chances but we're confident this system can work for us,' says Rolfe.

Pigeons to bridge Britain's broadband divide anybody?

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User comments

Does this count as a connectionless protocol?
UDP = Unsheduled Delivery Pigeon

By milliganp on 10 Sep 2009

Will add an entirely new group of viruses (and ticks) to "scan" for as your data arrives, wonder how the likes of Symantec can build that into future releases?

By skarlock on 10 Sep 2009

Dick Dastardley and Mutley are also hazards to factor in.

By Mr_Flynn on 10 Sep 2009

Just goes to show...

The old RFC for an extension to TCP/IP for TCP/IP over pigeon isn't without merit.

But it is hardly a surprise. Even good techy knows that it is quicker to courier a hard disk or tape with data to a client or satellite site than it is to transfer it over a DSL connection, when you have a decent amount of data.

We used to ship USB drives between our photo studio and the photo retouchers and web developers - a 50-100GB daily shoot would be in the office in a couple of hours, the 16mbps S-DSL line couldn't hope to compete.

By big_D on 10 Sep 2009

Dodgy maths

Saw this in the Metro and the maths seem rather dodgy. After 2 hrs it was 4% complete, but they then say it would take 6 hrs by internet.

So is that 4% complete or 40% complete?

40% doesn't sound so astonishing and it's always possible to find a quantity of data that will go between points a certain distance apart, quicker by any means than a slow enough connection.

By halsteadk on 10 Sep 2009

An interesting implementation of RFC 1149 ( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt )

By peterm2k on 10 Sep 2009

Patents are Great!

If the author of RFC 1149 had taken out a patent, he might be about to collect!

By milliganp on 10 Sep 2009

Tortoise beats Gigabit Ethernet

I can top that! 2TB data 10 metres across the office:

By Gigabit Ethernet: 3.67 Hours.

By Hard Disk duck-taped to the back of my daughter's pet tortoise: 48 Minutes.

By JohnAHind on 10 Sep 2009

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt Brilliant, even if dated the 1st April.

quote "Discussion
Multiple types of service can be provided with a prioritized 'pecking' order. An additional property is 'built-in worm detection and eradication'. Because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss of a carrier can be tolerated. With time, the carriers are self-
regenerating. While broadcasting is not specified, storms can cause data loss. There is persistent delivery retry, until the 'carrier drops'. Audit 'trails' are automatically generated, and can often be found on logs and cable trays"

Very cleverly written.

By nicomo on 10 Sep 2009

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