SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'

[TheCoxwain]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm


Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery - but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.
A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.
Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.



----
Too funny
:rofl:

[tk2kewl]

1. that is funny...

:D

...and sad :cry:

[hobbit709]

2. I can see it now

Millions of pigeons darkening the skies carrying little tiny flash drives.
:rofl: :rofl:

[lapfog_1]

3. Or, as I used to say to NASA management...

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of D3 tapes"

However, the latency sucks. :rofl:

[Lance_Boyle]

4. Yes, but subsequent tests have shown that it was a hermaphroditic pigeon. n/t

[csziggy]

5. This is just an update to RFC 1149 - CPIP (carrier pigeon internet protocol) is old tech

It was originally proposed in 1990, but was not tested in real world trials until 2001. The use of memory sticks is an obviously superior upgrade!

Network Working Group D. Waitzman
Request for Comments: 1149 BBN STC
1 April 1990

A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

Status of this Memo

This memo describes an experimental method for the encapsulation of
IP datagrams in avian carriers. This specification is primarily
useful in Metropolitan Area Networks. This is an experimental, not
recommended standard. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Overview and Rational

Avian carriers can provide high delay, low throughput, and low
altitude service. The connection topology is limited to a single
point-to-point path for each carrier, used with standard carriers,
but many carriers can be used without significant interference with
each other, outside of early spring. This is because of the 3D ether
space available to the carriers, in contrast to the 1D ether used by
IEEE802.3. The carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance
system, which increases availability. Unlike some network
technologies, such as packet radio, communication is not limited to
line-of-sight distance. Connection oriented service is available in
some cities, usually based upon a central hub topology.

Frame Format

The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in
hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff.
The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier.
A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The
bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and
paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A
typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed.

Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the
datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable
form.

More: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

May 4, 2001 1:15 PM PDT
Pigeon-powered Internet takes flight

By Stephen Shankland

One of the Internet's most obscure technologies came to life last weekend: transmitting network information by carrier pigeon.

In 1990, David Waitzman wrote RFC 1149, a tongue-in-cheek standard for using pigeons to transfer information using the Internet Protocol (IP). On Saturday, a group of Linux enthusiasts in Bergen, Norway, succeeded in exchanging some data using the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol (CPIP).

The group transmitted a "ping" command, among the most basic operations of the Internet, in which one computer sends a signal to another, which in turn signals that it is attached to the network. In the experiment, packets of network data were printed on paper then attached to pigeons' legs. Upon their arrival at the destination, the data was transferred to the computer using optical character recognition software.

The Bergen Linux Users Group had some assistance from the Vesta Brevdueforening carrier pigeon club and Alan Cox, a programmer at Linux leader Red Hat and top deputy of Linux founder Linus Torvalds.

More: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-257064.html

The actual trial with photos:

The informal report from the RFC 1149 event.

Finally, rfc 1149 is implemented! On saturday 28th of april 2001, the worlds very first rfc 1149 network was tested. The weather was quite nice, despite being in one of the most rainy places in Norway.

The ping was started approximately at 12:15. We decided to do a 7 1/2 minute interval between the ping packets, that would leave a couple of packets unanswered, given ideal situations. Things didn't happen quite that way, though. It happened that the neighbour had a flock of pigeons flying. Our pigeons didn't want to go home at once, they wanted to fly with the other pigeons instead. And who can blame them, when the sun was finally shining after a couple of days?

But the instincts won at last, and after about an hour of fun, we could see a couple of pigeons breaking out of the flock and heading in the right direction. There was much cheering. Apparantly, it WAS our pigeons, because not long after, we got a report from the other site that the first pigeon was sitting on the roof.

And finally, the first return pigeon arrived. The packet was carefully removed from the leg, unrolled and scanned. After manually verifying the OCR and correcting the few mistakes (gocr is quite good, but it *did* have problems recognizing F's in my end), the packet was accepted as a valid packet, and there was much cheering about what we saw:

64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms

http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup.html

http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/

[TlalocW]

6. They should have used two African swallows holding a coconut

With the memory stick inside the coconut.

TlalocW

[malaise]

7. Just watched it on BBC international

Funny

[Sebastian Doyle]

8. As Thom Hartmann reminds us often

pigeons aren't really birds, they're alien robots from Xenu. But easily faster than crappy DSL.