Other Avian Data Transfer Methods
Rafting photographers already use pigeons as a sneakernet to transport digital photos on flash media from the camera to the tour operator. Over a 30-mile distance, a single pigeon may be able to carry tens of gigabytes of data in around an hour, which on an average bandwidth basis compares very favorably to current ADSL standards, even when accounting for lost drives.
Inspired by RFC 2549, on 9 September 2009, the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a tongue-in-cheek "Pigeon Race" between their pet pigeon "Winston" and local telecom company Telkom SA. The race was to send 4 gigabytes of data from Howick to Hillcrest, approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carrying a microSD card, versus a Telkom ADSL line. Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom's ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of Winston's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete.
A similar "Pigeon Race" was conducted by Michelle Brumfield in rural Yorkshire, England: delivering a five-minute video to a BBC correspondent 75 miles away in Skegness. She pitted the pigeon (again carrying a memory card) against an upload to YouTube via British Telecom broadband; the pigeon arrived in about ninety minutes while the upload was still incomplete, having failed once in the interim.
In September 2010, ISP Timico UK pitted a few homing pigeons against a rural broadband connection to see which was faster. Each pigeon carried a microSD card with 200MB of HD video data, while simultaneously a typical Internet connection was used to upload the same video data to YouTube. This was done as a publicity stunt to raise awareness of poor Internet speeds experienced by many rural users.
These kinds of simple bulk transport do not use the Internet Protocol.
Read more about this topic: IP Over Avian Carriers
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