Pigeon Found to be Faster Than Broadband

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sanctoon

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yup, we even have fiber optic in the rural areas, Telkom have the infrastructure but they have the monopoly and is government owned, so yeah we get SCREWED with our 3gb caps and insane prices

The SEACOM line just 15x our total possible bandwith, hopefully we would see some fruition from that.

O and the pigeon only traveled 80km, and it had a female pigeon waiting for him on destination.
 
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@ Marcus, the ISP's name is spelled wrong in the article, Telom should actually be Telkom... errr, I mean Telscum!! Winston FTW!!
 
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It is widely known anegdote that final exam for network course at some IT university was summed up by just one question. (I know some university in some country but cant remember now)

You have amount of data to transfer over network 2Mb and you have a dog with 4 DVDs in his backpack. Which way is going to be faster and why do we dont use dogs to transfer data?
 
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ProDigit80 09/11/2009 5:17 AM
You can intercept those pigeons, and get USB sticks for free!
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and in these time of crisis even the free meal option catching the pigeon is welcome.

M A R C

sorry carlhenry :)

 

decepticon

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This is kind of an unfair comparison. The carrier pigeon had a HUGE lead on bandwidth. 4gb packets? and it's ADSL, what do you expect?
 

cyberkuberiah

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[citation][nom]tburns1[/nom]This is hilarious. Makes me think the sci-fi tech of Johnny Pneumonic had it right. And also, before anyone asks ...NO, the pigeon can't play Crysis.[/citation]

rofl...!
 

voodoobunny

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They were getting about 384kpbs upload speed, which is in the middle of the range for Telkom's fastest home ADSL line (256-512kbps).

384 kilobits = about 48 kilobytes per second; 4GB = 4096MB = 4194304KB @ 48KB/sec = 87300 seconds / (3600 seconds/hr) = about 24 hours.

So 4% in 1 hour is about right (assuming absolutely no overhead anywhere else).

To put that into perspective, Telkom charge about (*consults xe.com*)$55/month for that DSL speed. For about the same price in the US you can get 15Mbps download and 3Mbps upload on FiOS...

I don't often say this, but *thank heavens I am in the US!*
 

webgrunt

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Did anyone else notice that the article says that the file was only 4% copied in one hour and eight minutes, but it was completed one hour after that? I think they must have meant 40%.
 

tiredwolf

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I worked in Mozambique Africa with a similar experience, although the internet speed there was rated at 512k we would be lucky to get 5k per second. What they do is hook up outrageous amounts of people to the same box and create a massive bottle neck
 

mlopinto2k1

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[citation][nom]keither5150[/nom]I have two computers in my house. One time I copied a full 4.7 gig DVD and walked it downstairs and put it in the other computer.......I am also faster than broadband.[/citation]

Awesome. Simply Awesome. But, you are not impressive! :eek:P
 

annymmo

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[citation][nom]fierynaga[/nom]What about packet collision between pigeons?[/citation]

Birds have collision avoidance algorithms built-in.
Very error-proof.
 

Mysteic

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ADSL sucks and this just proves it. This is also a distorted view as the pidgeon was obviously not going very far.

Try that test again with a carrier pidgeon going from his home to another country on the other side of the planet.

Estimated results:
Pidgeon: Dies during trip and is never seen again.
ADSL: The exact same 4 hours from the first transfer.
 
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I am the guy from Unlimited who started the whole thing. It was 4GB.
 
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Ok let me clarify it for you guys. We pay about $5000 a month for 512Kb ADSL 'bussiness' connection here in Durban South Africa. I import about 500-600 MB a day into my server but the lines keep crashing causing all sort of problems for me. I am the DBA data is my life.So anyway after a particular trying week I just needed a break and was reading the April 1st RFC's on Wikipedia. That is where the idea was started. We flew Winston the pigeon 80 km from Howick to Hilcrest. The file was 4 GB . The ADSL needed another 2 days to complete. To be honest we could walk the memory stick from Howick and still beat our ADSL connections in Africa. Not for international data transfer but hell you guys comming to see the World Vup in 2010 forget about sending picture of the final match home. You will need to fly it there.
 
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@hakesterman: Any mechanism which allows data to get from point A to point B is a legitimate form of data transmission. The pigeon's characteristics would be:

- High bandwidth
- Very high latency
- No transmission receipt

It's like a primitive form of UDP.
 

Bruceification73

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[citation][nom]doomtomb[/nom]This doesn't make sense....Basic math please? 1 hour and 8 minutes to complete 4% but required an additional hour to complete. More like it requires 20 more hours![/citation]

1 hour and 8 minutes is the total time the bird took to take the trip (both ways). The article says, "By the time Winston reached his destination, only 4 percent of the file had transferred." This means after the bird got from point A to point B, not the whole trip, so it was probably half, or 34 minutes. The remaining 1 hour 34 minutes is how much time it took to transfer the rest of the 96%. This still doesn't add up, but at least it is closer. Besides, percent only measures the amount of memory that has been transfered. Some types of memory and files take longer to transfer than others, and connection speed can also change over the course of two hours.

Winston the pigeon kicks @$$, and broadband sucks. Verizon's wifi is better.
 
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