So a bunch of guys and girls finally had enough and got together to prove that Telkom’s Telkom “1Mb/s ADSL” lines are so low that a homing pigeon could probably deliver the data faster. So they stapled a 4Gb memory card to the pigeon’s leg and sent the same size file via Telkom Internet over the same distance.
The friggin’ pigeon won!
Check it out – this from News24:
Cape Town – Winston, a homing pigeon, has made history by beating a Telkom ADSL line in delivering 4GB of data from Howick to Hillcrest, outside Durban in just 2 hours 6 minutes and 57 seconds, whereas the ADSL download was “still just under four percent complete” at 11:45.
South Africa’s most famous pigeon, left Howick just after 10:00 on Wednesday morning and flew a distance of around 70km to deliver a data card (strapped to his leg) to financial services company The Unlimited at its head office in Hillcrest.
Your bog-standard pigeon
(Probably not too dissimilar to Winston)
Winston easily beat the ADSL line, despite giving it a 26 minute head start, while stretching his wings and waiting for the company data to be downloaded onto the memory card.
A confident Winston flew straight to his home in Gillits, outside Hillcrest, from where he caught a short car ride to reach the Hillcrest head office. Homing pigeons have a natural ability to find their way home from any point of departure.
Winston enjoyed huge support with messages from fans on his Facebook profile and constant tweets on his Twitter feed.
He himself also twittered several times with comments like “flying weather cloudy and cool, feeling good, no major problems to report… Hillcrest traffic is a worry”.
Positively hilarious!
Check out the Pigeon Race 2009 website here.
[thanks schalk]