September 10th, 2009
In South Africa, carrier pigeon faster than broadband
There’s no denying the power of effective broadband service, but in South Africa, the fast data delivery that it promises has yet to materialize.
So much so, in fact, that a carrier pigeon can beat it.
An IT company based in Durban, South Africa sponsored a 60-mile data transmission race between an 11-month-old pigeon carrying a 4GB memory stick and the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.
‘Winston’ the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles.
In that same amount of time, the ADSL had sent 4 percent of the data.
Of course, Telkom said that it was not responsible for the slow Internet speeds.
“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.
The idea for the race grew out of IT professionals’ complaints about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.
One IT pro based in the town of Howick said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.
Turns out he was right.
Howick-based Unlimited IT said the pigeon took one hour and eight minutes to fly between the offices. The data took another hour to upload on to their system.
South Africa hopes to benefit from three new fiberoptic cables being laid around the African continent to improve Internet connections.
Until then, well, there’s always Winston.
Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
