Pigeon Beats the Internet in Data Transfer Race

I've complained about the state of American broadband before, I think in general most data transfers are faster than this. In a race run in South Africa, a company proved it was faster to transmit data by carrier pigeon than to send it via the country's leading ISP.

Unlimited IT, frustrated by the speed of data transfer provided by ISP Telkom, the company tried transferring 4 GB of data 50 miles via homing pigeon as well as the Internet. The pigeon won, arriving in two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds. Meanwhile, the company, which regularly transfers data between its 11 call centers, managed to transfer only 4% of the data using Telkom's broadband services.

The time for the pigeon included unstrapping the card and downloading from the card to a computer. Winston is 11 months old, and has a Facebook page with over 3,000 fans, by the way.

In an ironic development, several Winston fans noted that their internet connections were too slow to follow Winston’s race online.