Last but not least: Winston takes off
A frustrated employee of The Unlimited in South Africa launched an unusual race—with an equally unusual outcome. Because he was once again annoyed by the slow data transfer speed, he came up with the idea of pitting a pigeon against the Internet.
A frustrated employee of The Unlimited in South Africa started an unusual race - with an equally unusual outcome. Annoyed once again by the slow speed of data transmission, he had the idea of pitting a pigeon against the Internet. How does a data packet get from the sender to the recipient faster, via the high-speed line of a South African Internet provider or with a carrier pigeon? Without further ado, Winston, an eleven-month-old pigeon, was given a data package and set off on a journey from the company's call center to its headquarters in Hillcrest - about 85 kilometers as the crow flies. It took the brave Winston an hour and eight minutes to cover the distance. Including downloading the four gigabytes of data at the destination, the transfer by pigeon took two hours and seven minutes. At that time, the computer transferred just four percent of the identical amount of data over the ADSL line. Winston, for his part, is said to be a permanent employee of the company. And on Facebook, too, he is having a stellar career, with more than 3,000 fans already.
