Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement 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. Winston is over the moon
East Africa gets high-speed web Africa - are you connected? 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. Are you in Africa? What are internet speeds like where you live? Do you use broadband, dial-up, satellite, or 3G mobile? Why is the internet important to you? Send us your comments. If you'd like to send a video comment, you can email it to [email protected] or upload it here. Name
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NoFunHere on September 19th, 2017 at 20:16 UTC »
This is actually a problem that is real outside of South Africa. In the world of exploding data, there are applications where data is being stored and shipped by truck (or even helicopters from offshore rigs) because it is faster and cheaper to manually transport the data.
thistleboy on September 19th, 2017 at 20:09 UTC »
In the late 90's to early 2000's I was big into IRC in channels where most people ran personal FTPs. I was stuck on dialup because DSL was garbage in my town and never worked. Cable was new-ish and prohibitively expensive. In utter frustration with endless downloads and repeated disconnects I went out, bought the largest hard drive I could afford and mailed it to a buddy of mine with return shipping. Took a little over a week to get an absolutely packed hard drive back with data it would have taken me six months to download otherwise.
Worth mentioning that he padded out the empty space with obese fetish porn. We always thought he was joking about that. He was not joking about that.
Melmab on September 19th, 2017 at 19:46 UTC »
Yeah, but the packet loss from that one pigeon getting got would've been a lot harder to recover from than a dropped packet from their service provider.