September 10, 2009
Pigeon Beats Telkom South Africa in Data Race
According to Bloomberg, a racing pigeon called Winston carrying four gigabytes of data strapped to its leg beat Telkom South Africa's ADSL data service download time by flying from one province to another.
The flight took an hour and eight minutes. In total it took just under three hours for the bird to fly to the port city of Durban and have the data uploaded onto the call center’s system, Sapa said.
In the same amount of time the ADSL transmission of the same data size had only completed 4 percent of its upload, the news agency said.
The idea for the race was born out of the frustration of an Unlimited IT staff member at the long transmission time for data, Sapa said. Pynee Chetty, a spokesman for Telkom, said he couldn’t immediately comment, when called by Bloomberg.
Read more in News 24, reporting on how a company called The Unlimited hired a high speed consultant, Winston, a top class racing pigeon.
You can fin out more about Winston and his training and preparation endevours by visiting the official website, follow him on facebook and, of course Winston tweets, so follow him at www.twitter.com/pigeonrace2009
Below, a picture of Winston from the BBC.
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