AndyHoffner.com

I saw on Gizmodo this morning a lovely article about a pigeon-that-could. The little guy took on the local broadband company in South Africa, and actually came out clean. Apparently, using a carrier pigeon and a 4 GB flash drive, tech-and-bird-enthusiasts sent a bird 50 miles to its destination while simultaneously attempting to transfer the file over the internet. The result, ironically, is that the pigeon was about 25 times faster. The point of the experiment was to demonstrate how terribly slow and unreliable S. Africa’s network really is. Apparently transfer rates are still in the Dark Ages over there.

But it might surprise you that here in the States we really couldn’t do better.

As my father pointed out on Facebook (“You think Comcast was bad…”) my Internet connection is no where near as slow as S. Africa’s. My internet is, however, Comcast bad.

To prove this, let’s replicate this wonderful experiment using my connection instead of S. Africa’s 3rd-world connection speeds. Using the same 4 GB flash drive (presumably glued) to the pigeon, and the same 50 miles distance to, say, my parents house in Highlands Ranch, and then assuming it’s a ‘average day’ and I’m getting a solid ~4 Mbps connection, I could realistically expect (taking into account latency, packet loss, etc) about 300 kb/s average transfer rate between my apartment and their house, and then assuming we’re using an “average” homing pigeon with a flight speed of about 30 MPH. The result?

Comcast: 4 Gb / 300 kb/s = 2.4 Hours
Pigeon: 50 miles / 30 MPH = 1.6 Hours

The pigeon still beats Comcast by almost 50 minutes.

Comcast proves not just 50 minutes slower over 50 miles – but about 10 MPH slower overall. Given pigeons can easily travel hundreds of miles (over mountain ranges and through storms mind you), you would probably be better off sending a pigeon across the country with a 10GB flash drive than ever using my Comcast connection.

Hmm, I smell an untapped business opportunity – the world’s first dedicated pigeon-based data transfer service! I mean, the wizards at Hogwarts have realized this for years:

While disadvantages of pigeon-based ISP’s are probably numerous, for even moderately-sized files — this one’s for the birds.

Related posts:

1. Internet Misnomer Act of 2009
2. Conspiracy Theories
3. Comcast Responds!
4. Comcast Followup
5. Comcast Screws Me YET AGAIN

-Andy

Tags: africa, comcast, hogwarts, ISPs, pidgeons, speed, transfer rates

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.