Carrier Pigeon vs. ADSL

From what I recall of the good old DSL days, the actual throughput you could expect was dependent on the distance from your location to the local telco. Luckily, I wasn't too far so I was able to attain some decent performance. For others, DSL might not have been too much better than dial-up.

An IT company in Durban, South Africa, was so pissed off at the performance of their ADSL connection that they actually decided to test whether or not data could actually be transferred faster by carrier pigeon. Guess who won:

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom. [...]

The firm said Winston took one hour and eight minutes to fly between the offices, and the data took another hour to upload on to their system.

Mr Rolfe said the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete in the same time.

Telkom claims that the IT firm haven't accepted any performance recommendations thus far. Still, I think it's pretty cool that a pigeon was able to lay the smack down on the tubez.