Race Pits Pigeons Against Poor UK Rural Broadband 298
Mark.JUK writes "Rural internet access in the United Kingdom, like many other countries around the world, is slow. So slow in fact that Trefor Davies, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at business ISP Timico, has decided to pit a typical rural broadband connection against homing pigeons (with attached memory cards) to see which can get 200MB of HD video data across an 84 mile trip the fastest. Meanwhile a farmer will attempt to upload the same video file to YouTube before the pigeons can complete their journey. The comical stunt is designed to raise awareness of the often woeful broadband speed experienced by many people who live in remote and rural parts of their country. However Davies does admit that 'there isn't a benchmark for pigeon data speeds,' yet."
Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
Re:Obligatory IP Over Avian Carriers RFC (Score:5, Informative)
I Went looking for that, and found this instead [wordpress.com].
"Bandwidth achieved by the pigeons was 2.27 Mbps."
Pigeon bandwidth is high (Score:3, Informative)
This has already happened... (Score:5, Informative)
The farmer was at 24% upload after 54mins when the first pigeon landed...
Now we can get back to our Monty Python / african swallow posts...
Quote (Score:1, Informative)
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996).
Re:African or European? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What is your name? What is your quest? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:African or European? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is your name? What is your quest? (Score:1, Informative)
0 of course. An unladen swallow would not contain any data. Now the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is another matter entirely...
Re:This has already happened... (Score:3, Informative)
It wouldn't even need to be that much, according to that wikipedia page pigeons have already been clocked at 75mph.
Ya, sneaker net always wins (Score:4, Informative)
If the data sets are large enough and latency not a problem. Doesn't matter how fast your connection is, FedEx is faster at some point. I mean let's say you have a 100mbit connection that really gets that and is dedicated to you. Going full blast 24 hours a day working at its max theoretical speed with no errors, it can transfer just a touch over 1TB per day. Realistically 800-900GB would be all you'd see, even if things were working well. Ok so suppose you have 5TB that needs to be transferred. It'll take a week of hogging up the connection to do that...
Or you could use FedEx. Copy the data on to 3 2TB drives and send them next day air to their destination. It will be there sooner.
We have a research group that does this all the time. They do JPEG2000 (and other) compression research and the data sets are massive. FedEx is faster than the net for the really big ones so they just send off the HDDs. Low tech but extremely effective.
No matter what, this will always be the case. At some level, sneakernet will be faster. What that level is depends on how fast a connection you can sustain between you and your target.
He'll also have to forgive me if I'm not that sympathetic to farmers. You make a choice when you want to live out in the plains. It has many advantages, such as lower land cost, a lot of privacy and so on. However it has disadvantages, one of them being it costs more to deliver high speed access. What's more, farming is a business, so I don't see the problem if they have to pay more to get a business grade Internet line out there. No matter where you are in the US, you can get high speed Internet. However sometimes it is only the most costly kinds of lines, something like a DS-3. For a consumer that is unreasonable, for a business it is not and make no mistake, that's what farming is.
Re:African or European? (Score:3, Informative)
Payload-wise, It's 0. Unladen swallows consist only of a packet header.