In South Africa, pigeons are faster than broadband
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In South Africa pigeons are faster than broadband.Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery - but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.What terrible conditions to live in.
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Dancing Pigeon http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmboyz/3914597681/
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September 14, 2009 at 2:05 PM
It also costs more to send data locally than it does to send it internationally.
Additionally, Telkom is not just a web company, it is a telecoms company, which is partially owned by the state and which still owns all the infrastructure.
September 14, 2009 at 5:54 PM
↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
WHAT ?!
September 14, 2009 at 5:58 PM
hahahaahahahah This is the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life!
September 14, 2009 at 7:23 PM
90% of the people who voted for the SA gov. that monopolizes the telecommunication industry do not know what broadband is. Phone calls and the use of these pathetic services is also the 6th most expensive in the world.
September 14, 2009 at 7:48 PM
this is misleading, while the pigeons latency is high, its data transfer is fast compared to most stuff, 2 GB an hour is faster than 90% of services offered in the United States.
167 MB in two hours (4%) is quite slow, but not terrible, at about 190 Kb/s its as fast as most bottom basement ADSL plans.
September 14, 2009 at 9:10 PM
Thats why it really fails when you have to deal with Telkom on a daily basis -_-
September 14, 2009 at 9:32 PM
I live in the UK and can only get a 2mb adsl line, with 512kbps upload. For four gigs that'd take ages to send at the average speeds i get. Theres loads of places i could send 4gb before i could send over my broaadband.
November 20, 2009 at 11:34 AM
Someone could shoot the pigeon and take all your sensitive data.
December 20, 2009 at 7:26 AM
While an interesting illustration, there's one fatal flaw to the logic there. The time it takes for the physical media to reach its destination is directly proportinal to the distance, whereas data sent via the internet should be (for all intents and purposes) very close to equal for any destination.
I could say the same here: it would take me far less time to take a 4gb usb key down the road to another building than it would to tranfer it over the internet; but it would take me significantly longer to send it all the way round the world, whereas electronic transfer would take the same amount of time wherever the data ends up.
December 26, 2009 at 3:18 AM
Ya, many countries still don't have good internet access.
December 27, 2009 at 8:00 PM
Sending a 2tb hardisk through Fedex to Japan is probably a lot quicker than uploading it from your home connection. Does this prove anything at all?
December 27, 2009 at 8:09 PM
In the US, bicycles are faster than broadband. Take a 2tb disk worth of data, start uploading it to a server on the opposite coast. Then copy the data to another disk, put it in a bag and get on your bike. You'd probably beat the upload by over a 100 days. Considering you got a somehow "average" upload of 0.7mbit.
April 13, 2010 at 9:07 PM
I live in Romania, and i still can't believe states that consider themself being a 1st class country's are still way behind Romania, and many of them still consider Romania a 3rd world country.
I'm an sysadmin and i worked in the last 10 years for Telecommunications companyes in Romania and Italy.. and all i can say is .. while in Romania we use Fiber Optic for home use and have 100mbps connections download and 10mbps for upload (yeah.. for home use) at a price of no more than 17Euro/month, in Italy the top providers give for home use ADSL(using phone lines) at an average top speed of 20mbps (in reality the average user will never have the possibility to use more than 5mbps because of the real limitations of the infrastructures the companyes in Italy have and use) and at prices that vary between 20Euro - 40Euro/month.
But on topic, someone pointed out that the data may go around the world using internet.. well.. i may say the contrary. Just do a "tracert www.somesite.com" in you command prompt and see how many hopes you get and where those servers are located.. you'll be surprised to find out they may be a few kilometers away.So, the test was more than accurate, since i'm sure there is no way that data would make a world around tour to reach destination, if the destination is only 60km away.. More, If the emiting server belongs to one provider, and the receiving one belongs to the same provider. And even if there are 2 different providers, usually the providers use peering to interconect theyr users.Even without peering, the largest trip would be till the first common peer to the 2 providers..
So.. guys .. move to Romania. At least internet here goes really fast :P. And we have great girls too :P
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