How many of us have experienced problems with our Internet connection? It’s a common problem whereby your promised connection speed rarely lives up to the delivered one, or the connection dies altogether; usually at the most inopportune moments.
A South African based business has come up with a solution though. Because their Internet connection was so slow and unreliable they decided to transfer data the old fashioned way… not by post, an older fashioned way than that. The financial services company used a homing pigeon, carrying a 4GB USB stick, to send files to its second office, 80km away.
What should have taken minutes using the high speed broadband connections the world relies on took the pigeon two hours, at which point the broadband connection had completed just 4% of its transfer!
This makes the pigeon over 20 times faster than the Internet.
They also think that the pigeon could cut his time down to a lean 45 minutes given training, making him 50 times faster than the Internet.
Kevin Rolfe, the chief executive of the financial services company, told the Metro:
For years we’ve struggled with the internet as a method of communication. It’s fine for e-mails and correspondence, but we need to transfer a lot of data from one office to another and find it often lets us down. If we get bad weather and the service goes down it can take up to two days to get through.
Of course the pigeon plan isn’t foolproof, and just as the Internet is subject to security risks, the pigeon faces risks of his own.
There are other problems, of course. Winston is vulnerable to the weather and predators such as hawks. Obviously he will have to take his chances but we’re confident this system can work for us,’ says Rolfe.
Having read this news, we at StuckOn are considering moving our offices to Wakefield in Yorkshire, where the fastest Internet connection pigeons known to man can be found.
Perhaps BT might find this news interesting and start to upgrade their lines with pigeons?
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