Around 3000 BC, carrier pigeons were used to exchange messages in ancient Egypt. Today, with “supersonic” data networks, are pigeons faster at transmitting data than gigabit fibre?
Up to a thousand kilometers, the dove wins, but after that...
The famous TechTuber website Jeff Girling It presented an updated version of the old story in which the South African telecommunications company Telkom found itself engaged in a race of sorts, which at the time demonstrated the relative merits of data transfer between pigeons and the Internet.
With the spread of high-speed local communications, such as gigabit fibre, we were anticipating the destruction of passenger pigeons in 2023. But hey, without wanting to do anything spoiler: The pigeon with high-capacity microSD cards has won the data transfer race by a wide margin.
However, Pigeons are overtaken at distances greater than about a thousand kilometers!
In 2009, a company in South Africa compared the transfer speed of pigeons with a 4GB memory card with ISP Telkom's local ADSL service. The dove delivered its payload of data within an hour and eight minutes. Added clock to physically transfer 4GB of data to computer.
However, ADSL was able to transmit only 4% of the same data At a distance of 100 km.
In the new version of the Girling Race in 2023, more than a decade later, the evolution of pigeons did not change birds significantly, but the data density was much higher. The YouTube user was able to outfit the bird with three 1TB SanDisk Extreme PRO drives (5GB each) without overloading it.
The bird flew one kilometer and took only one minute to reach its destination.
From that data point and adding the SanDisk flash drive transfer times, Gerling graphed Pigeon's 3TB transfer.
It seems to be transferred Passenger pigeons can conquer shorter distances, up to about 600 miles (about 1,000 km).But Internet connectivity will win over greater distances.
Taking running to another level
Girling wanted to launch another challenge to add excitement to the race. For this He boarded a plane to transport 3 terabytes of files from his home in the USA to a Canadian data center, which was also the target of online transmission. In the graphs, it can be seen that YouTubers perform slightly better over longer distances, but end up getting defeated by online transfers after the 5,000-mile (about 8,000 km) mark.
In conclusion, Gerling says he could easily have done better as PiJeff, filling his portfolio with very high-capacity drives, but he wanted to keep the 3TB capacity common to all the alternatives.
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