Pigeons — faster than the Internet (under certain circumstances)

The BBC is reporting that an IT company in South Africa, annoyed by how slow their internet service was, decided to pit Internet speeds against Winston the pigeon. Outfitted with a USB key, Winston managed a data transfer rate about 20 times faster than the internet.

But as Cory Doctorow points out on Boing Boing, that’s not actually all that surprising:

Now, this is very funny, but I think that over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn’t an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours.

I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.

I suppose you could look at this example as an airborne sneakernet. And, I note that the Wikipedia entry on sneakernets now includes this pigeon example.

Of course, it’s only because flash-based memory is so small and light that this is feasible. It’s a simple question of weight ratios.

Personally, my first thought was, “Aren’t homing pigeons extinct?” But then I realized I was thinking about passenger pigeons.

And, if you don’t know, that’s a tragic story — once the most common bird in North America (by some estimates, 40 per cent of all the birds on the continent were passenger pigeons) they were hunted to extinction in the early 1900s. Wikipedia gives some sense of their numbers: “During migration, flocks could be 1 mile (1.6 km) wide and 300 miles (500 km) long, taking several hours to pass and sometimes containing more than two billion birds.”