No doubt many of you have seen the stories doing the rounds that a South African carrier pigeon is faster than that country's broadband at delivering messages.
The news emerged after a Durban-based IT company popped a USB stick on an 11-month-old carrier pigeon called Winston to see how long it would take to deliver 4GB of data a 60-mile distance.
The company then compared the Winston's flight time of one hour and eight minutes (plus around another hour to upload the data on the recipients's system) with the paltry four per cent of the 4GB that had arrived in the same time via the company's Telkom ADSL broadband.
No cats or performance-enhancing seeds
The rules of the competition are even outlined in depth on Winston's own website with "no cats allowed" and birdseed not being allowed to "have any performance-enhancing seeds within."
Yet while Telkom denied all responsibility for its dreadfully slow broadband, a rep at the UK's Virgin Media has been quick to inform TechRadar that, following his detailed calculations, a pigeon would have to fly at 330 miles-per-hour to beat their 50mbps broadband service.
"On our service, that 4GB would take under 11 minutes to transfer," the Virgin Media rep proudly informed us. "For a pigeon to beat us, it would have to fly at nearly 330mph."
He was even kind enough to send us his calculations, which were as follows:
(4 GB) / (50 (megabits per second)) = 10.9226667 minutes
(60 miles) / (10.9226667 minutes) = 147.339843 m / s
147.339843 (meters per second) = 329.589842 miles per hour
Strewth! Even the fastest bird in the world, the Spine-tailed swift, also known as the White-throated Needletail (scientific name: Hirundapus caudacutus) can only do 171 km/h.
Your comments (11) Click to add a new comment
cynicman
September 11th 2009
11. yay... so you offer a 50mbps download... what is the upload... so if I want to send a 4gb file from point A to point B, will it really move a 50mbps? or do you only offer a crappy 1mbps upload?
when working with a vpn, the download speed means nothing...
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grimreaper
September 11th 2009
10. The internet situation in South Africa is terrible to say the least!
I would say that 90% of companies and individualy can only afford to rely on ADSL - and that at pricing which will make one sick to the bone!.
Everyone is on the take here...ISP, HOSTS you name it! This is the best legal "get rich scheme" of ALL time!
Most of the fault can be laid at the government run Telkoms door. After all, the majority of our parliament think that a monitor is a TV and wonder why they cant watch their favourite program on it! So what is all this hype about anyway? They simply have no clue and those that do are probably getting back handers to shut up!
We need someone with the 'balls' to shake this industry up!
So how about it Mr Branson??
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elroch
September 11th 2009
9. Glad to see Virgin media techs can use a calculator to do arithmetic. It's a shame they can't fix the frequent outages of service as efficiently. Currently experiencing over 15 hours of partial loss of service over the whole country, after an estimate that all would be fixed around midnight yesterday.
Oh, and doing the calculation does not prove that the virgin media service actually provides 50Mb over the given route.
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bobbob123
September 11th 2009
8. Any one who works in Telecoms will know the pigeon test is total rubbish. You get what you pay for and if the company concerned is using an ADSL connection for business (a call centre!) then they are morons. Telkom offers 100mb/s LAN services and if they really want to pay through their noses they can request 10Gbit/s+ services.. Broadband speeds are not the problem here - cost is, but if your business relies on speed, then, for now anyways, you'll have to pay.
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monello
September 11th 2009
7. People are over analyzing the "race". The company merely wanted get the message out there that we are being screwed by service providers, because we don't have beter alternatives.
It's pretty damn obvious the pigeon will never beat the ADSL over say 1000km, but who cares, that's not the real point and applying calculations to things that are pretty obvious is just silly.
The company achieved what they wanted to do and that is prove that for THEIR situation, transferring data from their one branch to another... they may just as well use a pigeon. Proving that there is a real problem in how far we lag behind the rest of the world when it comes to "broadband" (they also cleverly got stacks of exposure... good for them, very clever plan)
If you honestly think they would use a pigeon on a long term basis you should switch off your computer, step away slowly and never touch it again... please, for your own safety and that of others!
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ettubrute
September 11th 2009
6. @beezle & @stevec
Why paint a wrong picture of South Africa on this site? As the third SAffer to respond to this article, I have to give my side of the story with regards to the ADSL situation here...
I agree with beezle that stevec is wrong with the speeds available and used: I am a home user, and have the 4Mbps ADSL option from Telkom. Thus the 1Mbps is nonsense! Then, I am not as lucky as beezle, because I average an actual speed of barely 2Mbps, "due to the quality of the copper lines in your area" (quoted from Telkom's response to a complaint about the slow service) Unfortunately the capping is true. We really get screwed for every byte we down- or upload! Which makes us unpopular with peer-to-peer networks, because we tend to limit the number of uploads allowed...
Further, to beezle, about your sentence "The test is a little unrealistic, I believe the pigeon will always win over that distance, try increasing the distance, the ADSL speed will be more constant..." The point is that elsewhere in the world the speeds are available (see Virgin's offering!) for this data to be downloaded faster across a distance of 60 kilometers than a pigeon can fly (or a messenger can drive, for that matter). In that regard, we really are way far behind our compatriots in Europe!
Just my 2c...
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aakil
September 11th 2009
5. you are also comparing bits with bytes, you need to divide the speed by 8 before doing the calculation.
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beezle
September 10th 2009
4. @stevec:
I live in SA and dissagree with that statement. I'm currently on a 4096K/512K line, and I can assure you I atain close to the quoted speeds.
And I'm quite sure most serious business users are using more than 384K.
Besides there are a lot of othe factors attenuation being a common one.
The test is a little unrealistic, I believe the pigeon will always win over that distance, try increasing the distance, the ADSL speed will be more constant...
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stevec
September 10th 2009
3. Just to put this into perspective, in South Africa (where I live) most consumers run 384 kbs (ie 0.384 Meg) lines, while the fastest available is a 1 meg line. Plus we have to pay per GB of data we download and most consumers are limited to 2-3GB/month because of the enormous cost involved.
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jaffacake
September 10th 2009
2. Of course, in reality, the company was SENDING the file not receiving it.
Even on Virgin 50meg, the upload speeds are pitiful - far from 50meg, in fact 1.5meg.
So, let's correct the maths above...
329.589842 miles per hour /50 * 1.5 = 9.88769526 miles per hour.
I'll have 50quid on the pigeon to win.
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ralphh
September 10th 2009
1. MMm
The above calculation seems to rely on perfect delivery at maximum speed, in real life this may be slower, plus any lag the data might encounter copying to its recipient. This might well give the pigeon a real chance after all.
Please Techradar can you run a test?
My monies on the pigeon.
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