The scenario was rather unspectacular. A IT company had some call center in South Africa and they need to sync them every week or so. Since the ADSL Broadband connection could not match the maximum speed and it always took hours to transfer the data one member of IT Unlimited (the ISP) got frustrated
The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.
He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.
The company wanted to be innovative and gave the bird a chance.
"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's Kevin Rolfe [...].
They set up some ground rules:
They included "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within".
After that was clear, they chose the 11 month-old pigeon Winston to carry a 4GB USB stick.
It took Winston 1 hour and 8 minutes to reach his destination and another hour to copy the data from the thumb drive.
Mr Rolfe said the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete in the same time.
Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.
"Winston is over the moon," Mr Rolfe said.
And now comes the real WTF! There is a RFC standard for that kind of transportation called IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC).
