I count this as sort of a misleading article, but it is fun none the less. A homing pigeon with a 4GB flash drive took off from a location 80 miles away from its destination. A download of the same amount of data was started at the destination at the same time the pigeon was released. The bird landed with the 4GB of information in just over 2 hours. The computer had only downloaded 5% of the 4GB file in the same 2 hours.
4 GB is a lot of data (1000 songs, or 3000 photos, or a 2 hour movie), but it does wound pretty pathetic that a pigeon can move that information faster than a high speed Internet connection. However, the story also illustrates how paltry our high speed lines are in the United States. If the same test had been made in Japan, Korea, Finland, and 15 other countries who rank higher in Internet speed, the pigeon would have lost.
Read the article here at BusinessDay.
but the question begs, if the pigeon had to fly from New York to Seattle, would the pigeon still have won? 🙂
I would be curious to see what the DL speed of the file was and what sort of setup it was (dialup, DSL, cable, etc) …
Great post on pigeon transfers… maybe that’ll be the next technology that keeps us ahead of the other countries!!
Hey Matt. The article said that the download speed was an ADSL connection…at least 1.5mb I’m assuming. It just struck me as a funny article and comparison.
Just doing the math, 5% of 4GB in 2 hours is about .22mb. But even at 1.5mb, only 40% of the file would have been downloaded in 2 hours.
I used to be great at math and loved solving equations…thanks for filling that gap for me. I knew there would be a way to figure that one out. Pretty funny experiment, eh?
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