Apples Applier Than Oranges

September 2009

I’m increasingly bored of this pigeon that’s supposedly faster than broadband. Here is ABC News’ monumentally crap coverage of the race, save for the inexcusably ghastly picture:

This week, a South African call-center business, frustrated by persistently slow Internet speeds, decided to use a carrier pigeon named Winston to transfer 4 gigabytes of data between two of its offices, just 50 miles apart.

At the same time, a computer geek pushed a button on his computer to send data the old-fashioned way, through the Internet.

Winston the pigeon won. It wasn’t even close.

It’s a cute stunt to highlight an apparently a bit rubbish internet connection. It’s just epically unimpressive because, as an actual experiment, it doesn’t make the slightest jot of sense. The two aren’t remotely comparable. If the pen drive had been smaller, broadband would have won. Had the distance been longer, broadband would have won.

Internet speeds are measured in data/time, with distance being less important. Pigeons travel distance/time, largely irrespective of how much data you tape onto them. If I was to copy 500GB from my laptop, through the Internet, to my desktop across the other side of the room, I’m confident it’d take hours even on a good day, but I could easily hurl my 500GB external hard disk the same distance and it’d get there in seconds.

I don’t mind this sort of thing being done, but it’s been over-reported to a ludicrous degree, and ABC’s line “just 50 miles apart” suggests to me that they think the short distance somehow makes this more impressive. Of course it doesn’t. Everyone who’s ever worked in an office must know that: you don’t email large files to your friend across the room. That’s what pen-drives are for.

And let’s not start on their throwaway and derisory use of the term ‘computer geek’.