A South African IT company has managed to transfer data by carrier pigeon between its offices faster than by Telkom's (South Africa's biggest ISP) ADSL line.
The story, which has beebn followed up by Mashable today shows that this isn't an isolated instance of companies sending data by carrier pigeon, in fact it has even been defined as IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC).
The company, Unlimited IT strapped a 4GB data card to 11-month-old carrier pigeon, named Winston, and sent him on course to its offices in Durban from Pietermaritzburg. It took Winston two hours, six munites and 57 seconds to make the flight, in which time only 4% of the data had been transferred via ADSL.
The world and technology has moved on a lot but its nice to see that the good old trusty carrier pigeon still has its place.
I guess there is a serious point here and that is that dreadfully slow download speeds by ADSL can really hamper a country's development. South Africa is hosting the football World Cup next year and plans to have a much faster fibre optic cable linking southern and eastern Africa in place by then
The story, which has beebn followed up by Mashable today shows that this isn't an isolated instance of companies sending data by carrier pigeon, in fact it has even been defined as IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC).
The company, Unlimited IT strapped a 4GB data card to 11-month-old carrier pigeon, named Winston, and sent him on course to its offices in Durban from Pietermaritzburg. It took Winston two hours, six munites and 57 seconds to make the flight, in which time only 4% of the data had been transferred via ADSL.
The world and technology has moved on a lot but its nice to see that the good old trusty carrier pigeon still has its place.
I guess there is a serious point here and that is that dreadfully slow download speeds by ADSL can really hamper a country's development. South Africa is hosting the football World Cup next year and plans to have a much faster fibre optic cable linking southern and eastern Africa in place by then
