Is a Pigeon faster than the Internet?
[Jeff Geerling]'s latest project is literally for birds. Even though it has a brand new high-speed fiber optic internet connection, online backups of YouTube video projects still take hours. He decided to see if the conclusions of a 2009 study in South Africa still held true today: using carrier pigeons to send files may be faster than the Internet. [Jeff] is setting up an experiment to send 3TB of data per carrier pigeon over a distance of one mile to establish a baseline. Then [Jeff] sends the same 3TB of data over the internet and, donning the honorary pigeon hat, simultaneously embarks on an air journey to his offsite backup service in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a cassette-loaded station wagon hurtling down the highway.
[Jeff] points out that you also need to consider the transfer time of your files to and from pigeon-friendly memory cards. He jumped through several hurdles to minimize this, but it still consumed 2.5 hours in total. Trying to keep the comparison fair, he also spent a few days optimizing his internet connection to get the best speed possible.
Comparison of total transit times and distanceThe results are interesting. In the 3TB experience to Canada, [Jeff] assisted by air needed about seven hours, far exceeding the eleven hours of Internet. The chart above shows transit time for each method based on distance. As you can see, the Internet only wins when considering distances of several thousand kilometers. Carrier pigeons win at distances up to a few hundred kilometers.
Although it is not transported by air, Amazon's AWS Snowmobile service uses a huge truck to transport exabytes of data from your site to its servers. If you want to try this yourself, first read RFC 1149, A Standard for Transmission of IP Datagrams Over Avian Carriers from 1990, and its modern IPv6 version, RFC 6214. We we also wrote an article about another unusual application of carrier pigeons during the First World War.
[Jeff Geerling]'s latest project is literally for birds. Even though it has a brand new high-speed fiber optic internet connection, online backups of YouTube video projects still take hours. He decided to see if the conclusions of a 2009 study in South Africa still held true today: using carrier pigeons to send files may be faster than the Internet. [Jeff] is setting up an experiment to send 3TB of data per carrier pigeon over a distance of one mile to establish a baseline. Then [Jeff] sends the same 3TB of data over the internet and, donning the honorary pigeon hat, simultaneously embarks on an air journey to his offsite backup service in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a cassette-loaded station wagon hurtling down the highway.
[Jeff] points out that you also need to consider the transfer time of your files to and from pigeon-friendly memory cards. He jumped through several hurdles to minimize this, but it still consumed 2.5 hours in total. Trying to keep the comparison fair, he also spent a few days optimizing his internet connection to get the best speed possible.
Comparison of total transit times and distanceThe results are interesting. In the 3TB experience to Canada, [Jeff] assisted by air needed about seven hours, far exceeding the eleven hours of Internet. The chart above shows transit time for each method based on distance. As you can see, the Internet only wins when considering distances of several thousand kilometers. Carrier pigeons win at distances up to a few hundred kilometers.
Although it is not transported by air, Amazon's AWS Snowmobile service uses a huge truck to transport exabytes of data from your site to its servers. If you want to try this yourself, first read RFC 1149, A Standard for Transmission of IP Datagrams Over Avian Carriers from 1990, and its modern IPv6 version, RFC 6214. We we also wrote an article about another unusual application of carrier pigeons during the First World War.
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