[BBC News] SA Pigeon faster than broadband

trekkypj

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm

Thursday, 10 September 2009

SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'
Winston the pigeon was allowed no "performance-enhancing seeds"

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.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds.

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.

He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's Kevin Rolfe told the Beeld newspaper.

'No cats allowed'

Winston took off from Unlimited IT's call centre in the town of Howick to deliver the memory stick to the firm's office in Durban.

According to Winston's website there were strict rules in place to ensure he had no unfair advantage.

East Africa gets high-speed web

They included "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within".

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.

Mr Rolfe said the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete in the same time.

Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

"Winston is over the moon," Mr Rolfe said.

"He is happy to be back at the office and is now just chilling with his friends."

Meanwhile Telkom said it could not be blamed for slow broadband services at the Durban-based company.

"Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have, to date, been accepted," Telkom's Troy Hector told South Africa's Sapa news agency in an e-mail.

South Africa is one of the countries hoping to benefit from three new fibre optic cables being laid around the African continent to improve internet connections.

Something to cheer us all up....

Tea_Bag

its funny, cause its true. if you go to a internet cafe advertising "ultra fast broadband" you'd be lucky to get 364kbps, shared amoung 10-30pc's.

bealtine

trekkypj wrote: »

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm



Something to cheer us all up....

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

Data loss is a continuing problem, mostly due to hawks and other birds of prey.

netwhizkid

Tea_Bag wrote: »

its funny, cause its true. if you go to a internet cafe advertising "ultra fast broadband" you'd be lucky to get 364kbps, shared amoung 10-30pc's.

I'd say the vast majority of homes in Ireland have little more than 2 or 3 megs also, which may be fine for beboing and booking the odd flight, however try upload a file in a hurry or download a TV series or Movie and you will be back to the days of dialup and waiting, average ping times would be fairly crap also. I'd say not too many has actually what I would term a good connection, (including myself)!

PogMoThoin

netwhizkid wrote: »

I'd say the vast majority of homes in Ireland have little more than 2 or 3 megs also, which may be fine for beboing and booking the odd flight, however try upload a file in a hurry or download a TV series or Movie and you will be back to the days of dialup and waiting, average ping times would be fairly crap also. I'd say not too many has actually what I would term a good connection, (including myself)!

:rolleyes: 1-2Mbit is fine for most. The majority of dsl customers are on 1Mbit, even though lots of them can get more. Most people don't need more, but it would be great if everyone could get it, not the false promise the mobile phone companies give.

Sponge Bob

PogMoThoin wrote: »

:rolleyes: 1-2Mbit is fine for most. The majority of dsl customers are on 1Mbit, even though lots of them can get more.

A slight majority are on (up to ) 3mbit or higher now . The typical €5 a month difference between 1m and 3m incentivises them .