Pigeon Post Beats Broadband

Is it a sad day when a pigeon beats broadband? You make the call.

In a race to transfer four gigabytes of data between two company offices 50 miles apart, Winston the pigeon arrived with his memory stick in an hour and eight minutes. The rival download was only four percent complete.

The 11-month-old homing pigeon set off from The Unlimited financial services company's call center in Howick, South Africa, Wednesday morning. He arrived at the company’s office in Hillcrest, Durban, beating the ADSL line. (For the record, the line was from Telkom.)

"Winston is over the moon," the company’s IT head Kevin Rolfe told South Africa’s Independent newspaper.

Why the pigeon post? "For years we’ve struggled with the Internet as a method of communication," Rolfe told the Independent. "It’s fine for e-mails and correspondence, but we need to transfer a lot of data from one office to another and find it often lets us down. If we get bad weather and the service goes down it can be up to two days to get through."

With some speed practice (no word on whether he’ll have to do sprints), Winston’s trainers think he can get the flight down to 45 minutes (it was rainy and misty on the day of the trial, which didn’t help) – versus six hours to send the data via Internet. Yes, the Winston method also involves time uploading and downloading from the memory stick, encrypting the data, and strapping it to his leg, so the total time actually was two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds – but that’s still only a third as long as the digital method.

Of course, Winston has a few liabilities: "Winston is vulnerable to the weather and predators such as hawks," Rolfe admitted. "Obviously he will have to take his chances but we’re confident this system can work for us."

The idea for birdbrain versus broadband came from a frustrated Unlimited staffer who – while waiting for data to transmit – commented that it would be faster to send a pigeon.

"The exercise was really around how do we think out of the box... it gets people smiling and it gets people talking," Rolfe told the Independent.

A couple thousand fans followed Winston’s journey on Facebook and Twitter (sample tweets: "Flying weather cloudy and cool"), some complaining that their slow Internet connections made his trip tough to follow. Internet company Telkom had no comment to the Independent.

As for Winston, he's now officially employed by Unlimited, ready and waiting to earn the next feather in his cap.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.