shlammed

South Africa's broadband has got to be feeling pretty ill-equipped today considering a real, wing-flapping pigeon beat its transfer speeds. No really, a company found out that sending a bird with a 4GB USB drive was faster than uploading.

That has got to hurt for Telkom, one of South Africa's main ADSL providers, but damn is Winston the pigeon feeling like the man today. He is telling all the other pigeons, how it took him two hours to carry the strapped-to-his-back flash drive 60 miles to the company's second office in Durban. In the same time the broadband service had only sent 4 percent of the data. You do the math but that is pretty damn slow upload speeds. No wonder the guys at Unlimited IT first joked that a bird could send files faster.

1999blksi

how did the pigeon know where to go and who to deliver it to? did they have an employee wait all day to see if a ****in pigeon would come and bring with him a USB drive? that's messed....

i call bs on this report.

bruce fee

I call BS on you sucker!

Homing pigeon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is nothing new... We live in 150km away from eachother and nowhere near civilization. You are visiting me for some mead and to pleasure yourself with my wenches. Like the drunken oaf you are, you forget the key to my gun safe, so on your way home, I send my bird with you. You attach the key to my bird when you get home and you let him go.

Or you leave a message "i lost the key. next time keep an extra" with the bird.

It will fly back home where I feed it and give it shelter.

D.T.P

Lol that's jks. Is the company using dial up? Or the hardware is just nowhere close to the level it should be at?Regardless that's kind of sad yet funny.

1999blksi

homing pigeons are stupid and gay

bruce fee

compared to you, they're stupid maybe.

1999blksi

Come on now Bruce....don't be such a pessimist.

You're not the smartest kid on the block, but I'm sure you can get to a destination faster than a homing pigeon.

bruce fee

actually no... i'm horrible with directions.. i'd say i get lost all the time, but i generally don't have a direction.

i miss highway exits, take the wrong side street to my gfs house.. i've had to ask my cousin at least 6 times what unit # his house is... and that cause i've been there at least 6 times.

discrete mathematics? no problem. give you directions? no sir.

i would be on the homing pigeon. especially with the speed limits on our roads.

Trybal

Top Gear did a race of a car (obviously) and a pigeon. The bird won...with much time to spare.

kane2k

4GB of data transferred by pigeon in 2 hours and 6 minutes:

That's 4GB = 4000 MB (not really) / 7560 s ~= 500 kB/s ~= 4 mbps pigeon upload

Not that many normal business internet plans have that kind of upload here.

It did say though that they only got 4% done via internet, so theirs is ~ 160 kbps which is worse than the cheapest home plans here.