Thursday - September 10, 2009

I love my ISP

think you have slow internet? Think again. And count your blessings YET AGAIN that you don’t live in Africa

A South African carrier pigeon has transported data faster than sending it via the country’s internet network.

Internet speed and connectivity in Africa’s largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.

Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80km from IT company Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds—the time it took for only 4 per cent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

SAPA said Unlimited IT performed the stunt after becoming frustrated with slow internet transmission times.

The plucky 11-month-old homing pigeon took on state-owned Telkom’s ADSL line on Wednesday to see which could deliver four gigabytes of data fastest to an address around 85 kilometres away.

Winston was racing on behalf of The Unlimited, a telemarketing company based in the port city of Durban, which wanted to transfer the data from its call centre in Howick, north of Durban, to its offices in Hillcrest, on the city’s norther outskirts.

Announcing the race on its website Unlimited complained about the “great challenges in getting data from its locations across KZN (KwaZulu-Natal province) back to its central location for storage.”

Unlimited had decided to test the contention of a member of staff remarked it would be faster to send the data by pigeon than through Telkom, the fixed-line operator which has a monopoly on ADSL.

Visibility was poor on race day but Winston completed the flight in one hour and eight minutes

Sucks to be Telkom SA.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/10/2009 at 09:40 PM   
Filed Under: • High Tech •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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