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."
Re:You know life is good (Score:1, Insightful)
When you hear compressed video data, you hear TV. When I hear it, I hear Angiography. When my wife hears it, she hears international video-conference. Not all of us lame around watching TV all the time. But I guess since that's what you do, it's your first response.
Re:What is your name? What is your quest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dependent on the conditions of the race (Score:5, Insightful)
If you change the conditions of the race, you can just as well make it say just about anything.
If you give the pigeon a 512 KB message, and an identical 512 KB message to be sent via a rural broadband connection, then the rural broadband connection will win.
If you give the pigeon a 64 GB memory card, then you could say that the pigeon has a transfer speed equivalent to 104 mbps, which'll mean it's faster than most broad connections, rural or not. (Assuming an average speed of 60 miles per hour for the bird.)
Re:The DVDs (Score:2, Insightful)
I rather doubt that. You seem to be forgetting that you need to burn all that data to DVDs with verification enabled, carefully pack every DVD and load them all, then unpack and manually copy the data back to a machine. Don't forget that when one of those DVDs inevitably fails to properly read on the target system you need to fly back, burn a new one, and return.
oblig. Tanenbaum (Score:4, Insightful)
Pigeons always win at properly set up contests (Score:3, Insightful)
Who wins is depending on how you set your contest. And as this is no more than a publicity stunt, it's of course set up in a way that the pigeon is guaranteed to win.
200 MB on a memory card has the same "transfer time" as 16 GB. Yet suddenly the bandwidth is some 80 times as great.
A 10 Mbit connection has the same transfer speed whether it is to the neighbour's or across the ocean. Oh wait that's downstream; upstream is always slower. On my broadband connection uploading 200 MB will take about 45 minutes - downloading the same amount of data is done within 5 minutes. No wonder you pit the pigeon against an upstream.
And why not ask this pigeon to deliver the video file actually to YouTube? Not to some other point from where it's transferred to YouTube? Is that maybe because YouTube is in the US and that's too far to fly for the pigeon?
TFA admits it: "Also the farms connection speed is just 100-200 Kbps (Kilobits per second), so it never really stood a chance of winning but then that's not the point?". It is set up so the pigeon would win. And 100-200 Kbps up is not even that bad assuming ADSL over normal copper, and farms tend to be far far away from the nearest switch. It's one of those things one will have to live with when trying to live away from the civilised world.
Re:It won't take long. (Score:4, Insightful)
And one proprietary one that everyone in the real world is using because unlike the free one, you don't need an honours degree in computer science just to set the thing up.
Re:This has already happened... (Score:3, Insightful)
Depending on the roads, it could well be 84 miles by road but substantially less as the pigeon flies.
How about "tough shit, move to the town?" (Score:4, Insightful)
It should be beyond obvious that some amenities are made economically viable by a large concentration of people, and broadband is one of them.
If it made economic sense (ie, was profitable) to provide those services in rural areas, someone would be doing it. Usually someone *will* provide those services, but not at a cost the end-user will like for casual entertainment use.
Almost always these "rural broadband blows" stories involve around wanting the government to "do something" which usually amounts to a subsidy (my tax money for your service). I generally object to this -- either we end up with a "Universal Service Fee" which is like free money to the telecom providers, as it never goes away, overall higher prices so some mandate can be fulfilled, or some never-ending government bureaucracy like the TVA.
And I think some of this "demand" isn't from 1920s, sepia-tinted people living in rural poverty, but from city people who have made a conscious choice to live in the "country" (thanks to cheap gas) who also want all the amenities of city living but aren't willing to pay for them.
Re:African or European? (Score:2, Insightful)
Chill out dude, bad mods almost always get corrected. Like you said, the people who don't get the joke are the minority here. The moderator may also have simply been tired of the meme, which case an opinion of "Redundant" is justified.
Most of us like it though, so it gets corrected.
It's nothing to start a crusade over, jeeze.
Re:African or European? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there conversion rate from pigeon to station wagon?
Re:Never underestimate the bandwidth (Score:1, Insightful)
The big surprise is that the station wagon went obsolete before the magnetic tape, which is still the preferred method of bulk backup.
Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?" (Score:3, Insightful)
However really government should be kicking ISP ass to get this improved. Creating jobs in rural areas would solve a host of problems, and not having the network to do it for most the types of jobs you could telecommute to or operate whereever you can get people to live is a major hurtle. One might say that the ISP NOT doing this is doing their host countries a huge disservice and harming domestic economics (and considering MOST are state owned or subsided monopolies, not really fair either).
Think high tech jobs in the country, and being able to offer employees reasonable housing costs, and a wonderful environment. However if you do not have the infrastructure to do it, the the company has to, and that is unlikely to happen without huge injection of money from government. So there you go.
Re:African or European? (Score:3, Insightful)
A couple weeks ago I pulled 2gig and 4gig cards out of the washer. I let them sit for a couple days and tried them. They worked -- all the data was still there.
But how did the pigeon fare?
Re:What is your name? What is your quest? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is 11 meters per second. African or European.
http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/ [style.org]
However, as soon as you strap a memory card to the swallow, it is no longer unladen. By definition.
Therefore, the bandwidth capacity of an unladen swallow is zero.
Re:How about "tough shit, move to the town?" (Score:2, Insightful)
That's right. If you grow food for other people to eat for a living you shouldn't expect to have internet access, or TV or electricity either. There are just some things you should sacrifice if you are going to provide a service for others.
Re:Ya, sneaker net always wins (Score:2, Insightful)
Quite true. I don't think people who do live in more rural settings believe high speed access has to be 100% identical in cost to more urban settings. The issue is the amount of the discrepancy.
Perhaps so, but farmers make up a marginal percentage of the rural population (eg. only 0.7% of the total US population is employed in agriculture yet the Midwest holds about 22% of the US population); however, I think a farmer was used as an example because of the naive presumption that the common rural individual is a farmer. Meanwhile, all sorts of infrastructure (roads, postal or other; electric wires; telephone wires; etc) cost more to roll out in rural areas, yet there's plenty of those things in rural settings. One might believe that most people in rural settings don't want high speed internet (and hence it'd be difficult, if not impossible, to recoup the costs to build that infrastructure), and I'd imagine that might be true today; but, the same argue could have been made before widespread creation of roads and trains when it comes to Midwesterners desiring fresh tropical fruits. Yet, you don't see stores here selling bananas at $6/lb.
In short, I can appreciate your sentiments on the issue, especially when it comes to farmers being businesses. And you do seem to want to differentiate that most non-farmers/non-businesses are not in a position to pay for available high speed internet. I think the real question is, why aren't there more affordable options in rural areas (and by affordable, I mean on the order of at most 2-3x the cost of urban areas) for non-businesses.