In an attempt to show just how slow South Africa’s Telkom broadband is, a frustrated IT company had a race to see which would be faster: transferring 4GB by sending a USB drive via pigeon 60 miles away, or transferring the files via the broadband connection. There were even rules in place so as to not have any unfair advantage over the broadband such as “birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within.” It was faster to send the data by pigeon than by broadband. It took the bird about an hour to reach the recipient station, and it took another hour to transfer the data to the other computer. The file being transferred via the broadband connection was still at 4%. Telkom said that it is not responsible for the firm’s slow Internet speed. Winston, the bird, is safely back in the IT office, probably enjoying birdseed without any performance-enhancing caplets mixed in.
Sometime low-tech beats out high-tech.
Bah, they only tested it with UDP
Not much of a response from the ISP though.
…I know of at least on site in JBerg, South Africa (not far from District 9) that is pretty fast. For our work the other day I had to remote (from Australia) onto one of our clients machines to check a few things using teamviewer. The response time was pretty good. I was able to do what I had to on the desktop without too much hassle.
I also have to send zipped up software to them from time to time using MSN, all without any dramas. The files I sent weren’t 4Gb worth, but would certainly be closer to 4% of that and would take seconds, not hours…
Perhaps the infrastructure in some areas there is still poor, which again is hardly the fault of the ISP.
Here’s hoping they get faster soon…
I still love the idea of a carrier pigeon winning though 🙂
It is when the ISP has a monopoly in SA.
Though this story is funny, such “crude reality” hits me all the time.
I am downloading PCBSD installer dvd image and it will finish in two days!
I have a 128kbps broadband Internet connection and pay approximately 25 american dollars per such service…. All ISP here have similar rates and speeds….
Be happy of having such incredibly fast connections at such cheap prices!
Edited 2009-09-11 01:41 UTC
Living in Bolivia, I can relate. I pay about USD 50 for a 256kbps WiMax connection.
BTW, anytime I tried downloading something a server from South Africa it wound up timing out.
Actually I am from Cochabamba, Bolivia
Where are you located?
We have a municipal (as in, community funded) broadband connection here where we live, in suburban Seattle. It connects right in to the Seattle Internet Exchange. We get fiber to the home. I am paying about $50 for 20 Mbit down / 10 MBit up.
(A reasonably popular torrent – like Slackware say – will come down at a rate of 1 GB every 10-12 minutes.)
Anyway, I have to say it’s really an impressive example of what can be accomplished when the services to the community take priority over profit. I think more communities need to take the initiative to improve their internet connectivity where ISP’s fail.
There is a community near ours here that is doing something similar. The federal government is actually funding part of the effort through some bailout money (or maybe it’s part of some other initiative or both).
Perhaps you can get other people involved in your community and get the US government to help out.
I’m from Cochabamba, Bolivia… here the internet service is excessively expensive given the bandwidth they provide
50$ per 20Mbps…. you’re making me cry!!
For 50 euros I get 90Mbps here in the Netherlands.
Two hours to upload a 4-GB chunk? That’s god damn fast. With my current 8 Mbps connection it would take like 1,5 hours to download that piece, and 10 hours to upload it (1,0 Mbps upstream).
Whining /off.
E: dunno but it looks like the transfer was at 4 % after two hours or something. Missed a line and the story is misleading.
Edited 2009-09-11 04:29 UTC
The article did not mention what kind of upstream/downstream bandwidth is promised by the ISP (both end). Also, he should include the time for copying the data from the source host to USB stick.
What everyone seems to miss, but stuck me immediately when reading the article:
WTF? An hour to read 4Gig of a USB stick????
JAL
It seems you have no idea how slow USB sticks usually are.
It takes my computer about 2 minutes to fill a 4 GB stick, not an hour. Something must be terribly wrong for it to take an hour to load.
2 minuts that is 33MB/s or 266mbit and even if usb 2.0 is speced out at 480mbit i dont truly think it will hit that speed. i have a hard time finding a stick that will handle 25MB/s (well not if you read the manafactures spec)
3 or 4 minuts sounds more reasonable =)
Edited 2009-09-12 01:41 UTC
Indeed, but that’s still a long cry from 60 minutes
.
JAL
Snails have been proven to be even faster
http://www.notes.co.il/benbasat/10991.asp
You’re looking at a round-time ping of 720000ms. The bandwidth is pretty good, but the latency sucks.
Can’t help myself:
1. You’re missing a zero.
2. And the round-time ping is twice that, as it took the pigeon two hours just to get there.
Nonetheless, your point is well-taken — this is more a publicity stunt than particularly relevant to how most people use broadband (e.g., web browsing).
So I am. I feel like a bit of a tool.
The OSnews summary says the pigeon took an hour to reach the destination, and a (hotly-disputed) hour to transfer the data off the USB stick. If you were looking at a round-time ping, then it would be two hours for travelling and a couple of seconds to mount the drive and read/write a couple of bytes.
Exactly!
This is the first thing they teach on our data communication classes at University of Helsinki. You can get insane bandwidth by moving disks on a truck.
Then the story continues on the peer-to-peer course by explaining that moving disks by walking is a peer-to-peer network with rather good bandwidth.
Online peer-to-peer file-sharing systems are then built to solve the problem of figuring out who has what. They also make moving content around cheaper, as you don’t have to be walking around moving disks.
In Lesotho I pay US$495.38 (monthly) for a 1024 connection, and Telecom Lesotho has got it’s self on a spam blacklist and I cant send mail to hotmail anymore.
Edited 2009-09-12 13:10 UTC
US$495.38 (monthly) for a 1024 (kbps) connection.
Just curious does anyone pay more than that?
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes hurling down the highway”, As Tanenbaum once said