SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'

rghjones said:
Terrible PR stunt. A tortoise with a 1TB hard drive strapped to its back plodding between rooms would be quicker than a LAN connection.
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Haha yes, agreed.
But they are just trying to prove a point, just in a bad way.

It would have taken more than 50 hours to download the 4G file using that connection, they could have popped it in someone's pocket and walking the 60miles at an average walking speed of 3mph, and done it in under 17 hours. That would leave 33 hours to play with. Guess they could have stopped of at every pub on the way, and passed out under a tree 4 hours, then get arrested for drunk and disorderly in public and spend 24hrs in a holding cell, eventually arriving, still beating the Adsl connection download rate.
 
it's really a question of latency and bandwidth...

internet = low latency, low bandwidth
pigeon = ridiculously high latency, high bandwidth...
 
dirtydog said:
Sure, but why is the BBC providing the publicity free of charge and releasing misleading 'news' articles?
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The company who performed the stunt are both protesting against the low throughput provided to them by their Internet service provider — highlighting a serious issue in South Africa and other developing countries — and seeking a more viable method of going about their business. Through this stunt their protests have succeeded in becoming newsworthy.

It has been reported by numerous outlets in South Africa, and by news agency Reuters yesterday when the test took place. Here in the UK it has even been reported on by our beloved Daily Mail, who make the intentions of the company involved clearer:

Daily Mail said:
Unlimited Group boss Kevin Rolfe said: 'It might sound crazy in this day and age, but we're always looking for new ways to move our business forward and we think this might just work.

'For years we've struggled with the internet as a method of communication. It's fine for emails and correspondence, but we need to transfer a lot of data from office to another and find it often lets us down.

'To send four gigabytes of encrypted information takes around six hours on a good day. If we get bad weather and the service goes down then it can up to two days to get through.

'We started looking at other ways to solve the problem and discovered that carrier pigeons could do the job a lot more quickly.'

If the first pigeon flight is a success bosses will employ Winston and some of his friends to make a weekly trip between the firm's two offices.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/wor...on-carry-data-transfer--faster-broadband.html
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The fact it is the most shared article on the BBC News website at the moment, and the second most read, just about sums it up.
 
haha made me LOL

edit: "The firm said Winston took one hour and eight minutes to fly between the offices, and the data took another hour to upload on to their system. " an hour to copy 4gb from a stick? :confused:
 
While this particular case is clearly a publicity stunt and the use of a pigeon just a headline-grabber, the basic underlying point is a valid one. It really is possible for a physical means of data transfer to be faster than an electronic one under certain circumstances. This is referred to as a Sneakernet (presumably mainly by geeky Californian academics) which can have vast throughput at the cost of enormous latency but still achieve a higher rate of transfer overall.
 
hmm true
I had to do these stupid questions in my A level Physics exam ;)
But still kind of prove, a point.

For example, Windows 7, you can dl the trail version or order it and DVD and have it shipped to you're house?
Windows 7, File size: 2.44 GB (KB) (this prob wrong i just googled it, :P)

Average UK connection: 1 (Mbps).

So 1Mb connection is a max. theoretical download speed of 128kB/sec
It would take under 10 hours to download, while ordering the DVD would prob take 3 - 7 days to arrive by post, ie downloading is quicker.
 
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