Faster than Telkom ADSL at a fraction of the cost!

[Superscenic]

Yes we all hate telkom and have heard of "Helkom" , but now one intrepid techie is actually shaking Telkom by their gonads. This guy will prove that Telkom ADSL is no faster than 2000 year old messenger Technology: PIGEONS! (Excepting the flash disk of course)

Here is the link to his site:pigeonrace2009.co.za/pigeon-race-2009-blog
Here is the original mail:
Bwa Ha Ha Ha, suck on that Telkom.

[Dave A]

Classic!

[Superscenic]

I love Telkom's response to this situation: Contact him for his details and make sure he gets good service, They can jocky his connection all they like, they will still be a laughing stock...um...more so I mean.

[Dave A]

You could probably send a hard drive full of data by post faster...
And cheaper!

It's a great stunt though.

[tec0]

When GPRS was first conceived I thought this will be the end to Telkom’s supremacy when it comes to data and networking. Sad was the day when I learned that normal cost per megabyte was no less then R2 when it’s “out of bundle on Vodacom� So back then I did the math and worked out that a standard DVD of 4.7GB would cost you over R9300 to download. So sending a DVD to the person would only cost you something like R240 if that. Fact is all our providers are really expensive and slow when it comes to data transfers of this size. Then there is there is a question of reliability of the down load itself.

But I love the way this was done!

Excellent Stuff!

[Morticia]

Pigeon beats T(H)elkom

Now we have scientific proof!!

Cape Town - Winston, a homing pigeon, has made history by beating a Telkom ADSL line in delivering 4GB of data from Howick to Hillcrest, outside Durban in just 2 hours 6 minutes and 57 seconds, whereas the ADSL download was "still just under four percent complete" at 11:45


http://www.news24.com/Content/SciTec...n_beats_Telkom

[Dave A]

ADSL only got to 4% complete
I thought the pigeon would win, but I didn't expect it to be by that kind of margin. At that rate it would have taken ADSL 50 hours+

[Marq]

ADSL = A Decoy Slow Line........sort of like a stool Pigeon.

[Superscenic]

costing not mentioned.

It costs the company R1 a day to maintain one of those pigeons. I would like a good cost breakdown including transporting the pigeon there (site) and from roostery (is that the right word?) to the head office. Still for telkom's hefty R50 000 a month one could employ an entire village or two with relay ponies.

Seriously this money could be spent better methinks.

[tec0]

4GB is modest you do get 32GB Micro SD cards that a Pigeon can handle. Makes one wonder

[Dave A]

There is some element of horses for courses here. If you want to move 100KB of info, the pidgeon is going to lose big time. So to some extent the race was not exactly fair.

However, compared to so many other countries, our internet is still in the dark ages. I'd been strongly recommended to watch a 45 minute Matt Cutts video on SEO at a webmasters forum site the other day. After downloading 20MB I only had gotten 15 seconds into the video. It may be an MP3 but it is far from optimised for transmission over the net.

So I bitch about how much bandwidth this is going to chew up, and that it's going to take a day or 2 to download. And everyone there is going "What's your problem? You click - you watch." The concept of slow broadband (and caps) is that foreign to them.

Just goes to show. You don't know how bad the service you're getting is until you've received much better service.

[tec0]

Well the truth is ALL our service providers are in it for the money, and they are making a truck load of money every hour of every day! Fact is we have to pay them or learn to be without the internet. Fact is we as consumers are nothing to them! They know we cannot do business without them so they will just keep on ripping us off till one beautiful day when South African Citizens say no more and do the big turn off!

They will face millions in loses in just a few days and in a month or two they will be begging us to use their services. Sadly this day will never come because you will never get people to say NO for mobile phones and or the internet because it is there companies lifeblood.

However, just maybe your service providers will start to feel guilty and lower their cost but I will probably see extraterrestrials long before that ever happens.

[tec0]

I really don’t see the reason behind upgrading your dialup line to a much more expensive ADSL line if you just want to move 100KB’s worth of data. My perspective as an IT Consultant I would not do that kind of recommendation. Fact is if you want to move 100KB’s worth of data get yourself an EDGE modem and Virgin Mobile.

See the fact is we are paying too much for ADSL as a contract and I don’t see it being worth it if your company has a very small data-print something like 50MB a week. Fact is you will probably transfer data faster via a delivery service if the data is something like 20GB and up. Anything from a Terabyte and up and you will pay too much to download it and it will take a long time.

There is an important lesson here, and I think it has been neglected. Identify your internet needs and structure around it. If it is massif amounts of data start looking for alternatives... and base it on cost.