Carrier pigeon beats South Africa's Telkom in data transfer race

Sep 9, 2009, 14:36 GMT

Johannesburg - In South Africa, it's faster to charter a carrier pigeon to transport large amounts of data than it is to send it over a 'high-speed' internet connection.

Winston proved it.

The plucky 11-month-old homing pigeon took on state-owned Telkom's ADSL line on Wednesday to see which could deliver four gigabytes of data fastest to an address around 85 kilometres away.

Winston was racing on behalf of The Unlimited, a telemarketing company based in the port city of Durban, which wanted to transfer the data from its call centre in Howick, north of Durban, to its offices in Hillcrest, on the city's norther outskirts.

Announcing the race on its website Unlimited complained about the 'great challenges in getting data from its locations across KZN (KwaZulu-Natal province) back to its central location for storage.'

Unlimited had decided to test the contention of a member of staff remarked it would be faster to send the data by pigeon than through Telkom, the fixed-line operator which has a monopoly on ADSL.

Visibility was poor on race day but Winston completed the flight in one hour and eight minutes.

The entire data transfer operation - including the upload of the data card onto the pigeon's legs and input into the computer system at the other side - took a total two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds.

During all that time, Telkom's notoriously slow ADSL line had managed to send only around 4 per cent of the data.

Winston's victory was celebrated by his fans, including his 1,798 Facebook friends.

'Please dear Winston, free your people from the Cyber Stone Age era. Deliver us from the tyranny of Helkom. Lead us into the promised land where there is a free flow of information...,' another wrote on the social networking site.

'Eggsellent job,' one friend joked.

Internet speeds in South Africa are hampered by a shortage of bandwidth, which also makes internet use costly.

Relief is on the way for African internet users. Seacom consortium completed a 17,000-kilometre submarine fibre-optic cable system linking southern and east Africa to global networks via India and Europe in July. Internet operators are currently negotiating hook-ups.