Pigeon Wireless Internet actually faster than ADSL

And you thought your internet connection was slow. A group of internet users in Israel and abroad got together to test out the speed of their Wi-Fly network (that would be pigeon-empowered wireless internet to those of you non-cutting edge types) vis-a-vis the ADSL infrastructure. Participants gave three homing pigeons a pack of memory cards summing to 1.3GB per pigeon, or 4GB in total, and had them fly 100 km. This marked an improvement over the old Wi-Fly methodology, in which the birds carried paper transmissions. The switch from analog to digital did the trick, enabling the pigeons to beat out an ADSL connection for raw data transfer over the same distance, and achieved a record for pigeon data transfer in the process. Here at Engadget right now we're doing speed trials to see if the New York breed of pigeons can take on EV-DO. We'll let you know how it goes.

[Justin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Ha, that's awesome! =)

[iPodTodd @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

You might also want to try the speed vs:
Bike Messengers
Hyper-Active 6 year-olds
My cousin Sal (he's a really fast walker)
My paper route guy, never seen a Dodge Dart move so fast while throwing papers out both sides of the car. There should be some olympic event....

[Kompera @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

yeah, but the lag's a bitch for playing quake..

[Chin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

yep, but its the same time lag for any size of file... so a 2kb file would take the same amount of time as the full 4gb, whereas adsl would whoop it..

ehehehe however it is pretty funny, and cool! ;)

[Chin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

yep, but its the same time lag for any size of file... so a 2kb file would take the same amount of time as the full 4gb, whereas adsl would whoop it..

ehehehe however it is pretty funny, and cool! ;)

[Whitlock @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Snail over Internet Protocol is faster!!!

[thirdfey @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Can we petition for an addendum to the RFC standard or make a new RFC standard out of this: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt?number=1149

[theSAWzall @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Gives a whole new meaning to "My net connection's crapped out on me again!".

Also it's not very secure, especially during hunting season!

[Brian @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a trunk full of hard drives.

[Andrei @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

And what was the dropped packets ratio?

[Robert Preseau @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

depends on whether it's hunting season or not.

but what happens when the hamster gets tired? what makes my computer go then??

[doctord @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Yeah, faster over a 100-mile path. But I'd like to see how they'd compare over a pth from, say . . . New York to Haifa? Now that would be a comparison!

Oh, and throw in some hawks or eagles, too, just to make things interesting.

[Ben @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

There is a whitewater rafting place near me that has been, and continues to, use pigeons to transfer pics of their trips. A camera man takes pics up stream as you pass in your raft, straps it into a custom lycra backpack for the pigeon, the pigeon flies it back to base for processing. The pics are ready to purchase when you get back to your car to go home. Even though they have since switched to digital, they still use the pigeons, as it is much faster than uploading over a cell modem or something: http://www.shoprma.com/pigeonx/index.htm

[Steve Mueller @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

This is another take on a really old computer science maxim/joke. It used to be said that nothing beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes speeding along a freeway, but the latency was a bitch.

[Ritchie @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Well, for those of you who want to know more on pigeons, read the followings :

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

and

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html

you won't be sorry ... :-)

[Eric @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

If you strap a Seagate 400GB drive to the pigeon would you be approaching Internet2 speeds? Or would that require a RAID array?

[kyle @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

pigeons are good for all kinds of things
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

[Doc Zaius @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

#14, you made my day.

[Adrian Heng @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

In my spare time next week, I intend to load a pack of wolves and later on, horses with 10 terabytes worth of data on harddisks and make them run that 100km. I reckon I win already in theory though the real problem is to find those horses, wolves or even afford the 10 terabytes... :C

[Jayson Elliot @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Ritchie, that made my WEEK.

For me, nothing is going to beat the ASCII pigeon art for a long, long time...

"Carriers in the queue too long may leave log entries, as shown..."

[Ido @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Thats so last year... ;)
The above experiment was done last year, this year they did SNAP (SNAil-based data transfer Protocol), which uses snails to transfer data.

gives a whole new meaning to snail-mail.

http://www.notes.co.il/benbasat/10991.asp

[minimalistic @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

When I first read this, I thought they were attaching wifi signal strengthening/extending blah whatever you call it equipment on them.

[jc @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

Hope a P2P comparison will be soonly availabe !

P2P : Pigeaon to pigeon obvsiously :)

[Tucker @ Dec 19th 2005 1:20AM]

#16:
That reminds me of Holy Grail..
"
-Are you suggesting 400GB Seagate Drives are migratory?
-Not at all! It could be carried.
-What? A pigeon carrying a 400GB Seagate Drive?
-It could grip it by the husk!
-It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound drive...

African swallows, yada yada yada.