Pigeon post

On more than one occasion I have bemoaned the (lack of) speed of the internet connection that we get up here, but a story from South Africa this week made me think that perhaps things aren't actually too bad after all. A company in Durban, disgruntled with its ISP's download speeds, attached a 4GB memory stick to a carrier pigeon and got the bird to fly 60 miles to its other office building; whilst Winston (for that was the pigeon's name) was flying, the same 4GB of data was uploaded to the other office via the internet.

Winston took just over an hour to fly the 60 miles, and it then took a further hour to download the data from the memory stick, giving a total time of around two hours to deliver the data. During that two hours, guess how much of the data had been sent via the internet?

Just 4%.

So, maybe I shouldn't be so critical of Tamaani after all. I guess on the days that things get really slow we could follow the South African example, but as there are no pigeons up here I suppose we'd have to use geese instead. However, they'd probably get shot and eaten before they could deliver the goods, so maybe it's not such a good idea after all.

Brings a whole new meaning to the term 'mega-bite.'