Pigeon is faster than broadband connections
Broadband promises to get the world together with high – speed delivery of data but, in South Africa, the internet still seems to be slower than a normal pigeon.
An IT company based in Durban gave a 11 month old pigeon a 4 GB memory stick and pitted it against an ADSL service from Telkom, the biggest broadband provider in the country. Winston the pigeon took just 2 hours to take the data nearly 60 miles, which was the same time that the ADSL connection took to send about 4% of the data.
Telkom shirked responsibility for the slow internet speeds of the firm.
The whole idea for the race came about when a staff at Unlimited IT had complained about ADSL speeds. He said that a carrier pigeon might be faster.
Unlimited’s Kevin Rolfe mentioned to the Beeld newspaper that, due to their reputation for innovation, they decided to put the statement to the sword.
Winston had depart from their call center in Howick in order to deliver this memory stick to their Durban office. There were some rules to ensure that he didn’t have any undue advantage, such as ‘no cats allowed’ and that birdseeds shouldn’t be performance – enhancing.
The firm mentioned that it took an hour and 8 minutes for Winston to get to the Durban office and that another hour was taken up by the data to get uploaded onto the system.
Hundreds of people in SA had followed this on Twitter and Facebook. Rolfe said that Winston was delighted and that he is ‘chilling out’ with his friends at the office.
Telkom said that they were not to blame for the slow speeds, saying that a number of proposals had been made to customers, but they had been rejected.
South Africa is one of a number of countries hoping to gain some benefit by way of 3 new fibre optic cables which are to be laid in the African continent in order to up the level of internet connections.
Source - BBC News
