Pigeons Are Faster Than Dsl!

[The Simpleton 2]

This is a funny story that I came across in a magazine recently. A South-African IT company decided to hold a race against their country's (the article didn't mention the country's name) DSL broadband service. Representing the company was a homing pigeon, whose task was to deliver 4GB of data(sotred in a flash drive) to a destination 95kilometers away from the starting point. At the same time, a computer with a broadband connection was used to send the same data to another computer located at the same destination. This race was held by the company as a protest against their country;s poor broadband speeds, and they proved their point - the pigeon won!The pigeon managed to cover the distance in 2 hours and the data reached safely. But after 2 hours, the computer had uploaded only 4% of the data! I always keep complaining about my connection's low speed but this story really opened my eyes!!

[inverse_bloom 0]

That is funny and quite entertaining as well, still 13 meg uploaded every ten minutes is'nt so bad... (well at least in my opinion). I use a wireless dongle and easily average a speed of about 120 kbps upload, so a 13 meg file would take... a bit under 1 minute and 50 seconds.However, I have seen my wireless dongle "download" a file at a rate of over a meg a second (300 kbps is the average what service provider estimates it to be, but over a 1 meg second is VERY fast for average consumer wireless internet!).

Edited November 12, 2009 by inverse_bloom (see edit history)

[sheepdog 10]

LOL, now that is funny! And I thought my connection speed was bad!I have satalite now, but when my contract runs out I was thinking about going to DSL. Know it's slower, but SO much cheaper. We live in a rural area, and I have always complained about our mail delivery system, I swear it would be faster if we went back to the pony express. We are so far out in the sticks it takes 3 days to get an overnight here!

[greenpeace 0]

The dial up connectivity that is the only mode of internet connectivity available in rural India. Even though most part of the country is covered by mobile towers, 3G is not widely available. I used dial up when I was in India and it was extremely slow and I was never able to send a file more than 2 MB over email due to connectivity problems. Now BSNL, India's national telecom company, offers DSL connections in many villages.To send 4 GB data over dial up, I cannot think of it.... I would prefer a pigeon instead.

[The Simpleton 2]

The dial up connectivity that is the only mode of internet connectivity available in rural India. Even though most part of the country is covered by mobile towers, 3G is not widely available. I used dial up when I was in India and it was extremely slow and I was never able to send a file more than 2 MB over email due to connectivity problems. Now BSNL, India's national telecom company, offers DSL connections in many villages.
To send 4 GB data over dial up, I cannot think of it.... I would prefer a pigeon instead. smile.gif

While BSNL's pricing policy is reasonable, the speed/bandwidth packages are still unreasonable and unfailr From the rural point of view the services offered are good, but for the urban folk some new packages could be introduced. For example, the unlimited bandwidth package needs a speed boost - I wouldn't mind paying around Rs.1000 per month for unlimited b/w at 2Mbps speed. But that's a distant dream right now...

[mahesh2k 0]

You're using BSNL ? Damn, that company is cheating people in 2009. Charging 1k for unlimited access ? and landline compulsory ? what the heck. besides that some unlimited plans are at night 12 or 2 to morning 8 they give unlimited access. Who's gonna disturb health and use at that time ?What 2mbps can do if they're not with unlimited bandwidth plan ? Weird marketing and poor planning defines BSNL.I think you should switch to airtel,tata or hathway. These providers have much cheaper plans and i think you'll get more bang for bucks. DSL and that too with BSNL definitely sucks. I think hathway offers unlimited 128kbps@500 rs. which is affordable and highspeed plan. That is way too better than BSNL's any costly plan. It's time to switch to another ISP now.

[greenpeace 0]

For rural India, BSNL in the only option. I used Tata DSL but the prices were not good and service was a mess...

[deadmad7 4]

I'm sure I remember a story in which a research lab approached Comcast for advice on the quickest way to move several terabytes of data from their data collection station to a main lab on the other side of the USA.
Apparrently Comcast mulled the request for a few days, then simply replied "FedEx".

Jon Bentley described a similar case from more than 20 years ago; its included in his compilation of ACM columns "Programming Pearls". In that case, the journey was in California, from one national research lab to another. The pigeon won there, too - not a huge suprise given that the link was something like a modem running at 9.6kbits/sec. Of course, the amount of info the pigeon can carry is entirely dependent on the sort of technology it's carrying.A decade or two ago it would have to carry a 3.5" HD just to transfer a few hundred megabytes.I love the ISPs response, "Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds". Why would they have anything to do with data transmission speeds across their lines?

Hackers, put down the keyboard and put out some sunflower seeds.

Just some background on this story: We have the worst internet and phone service in the world here. Not just the slow speeds, we pay through our noses for data as well. A 40MB data package at 300kbps costs R70 a month. The highest package you can get is a 3GB 700kbps deal for R600 a month. Just to put this into perspective, the average income in South Africa is R600 a month. That's right, you get a whole 3 Gigabytes of data (up- and down-load) for a months' salary. So this may have been a PR stunt, but it shines the spotlight on our useless government (Telkom is government owned and run). When our telecoms minister, Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri (commonly known as "Poison Ivy), died a few months ago, there were nation-wide celebrations.