I found this via Watkykjy and it is classic. I am quoting the whole letter verbatim:
Hi Guys/GalsWe are having a bit of fun at the expense of our favourite telecoms provider Helkom. Let me explain. We have satellite call centres which are connected via business ADSL’s to our main data centre. As usual these connections where very unstable and extremely slow. This caused a huge amount of frustration for us as we need to move voice logs(100’s of megabytes) a day up to our main databases for QA and legal purposes. Our company runs on sales and without voice logs we have no binding contract between us and the customer. So they are pretty essential.
Anyway I read a Aprils fools white paper about Avian carrier networks a couple of years ago. Basically it is a protocol that uses racing pigeons as a network layer. This got me thinking about how fast we can transfer the data by racing pigeon. I discussed this idea with my CIO one night having a couple of drinks. When we did the math we found out that we can transfer the data faster by pigeon for certain sites. So we made a project of it. Next week Wednesday is Pigeon VS ADSL day here at the unlimited world. We have the media involved so check the Sunday times for a article on this event.
Basically we will be flying a pigeon with a 4GB micro SD card from Howick to our central site in Hillcrest. We did a dry run yesterday. Here is the stats: Pigeon took 48 minutes to deliver the data. ADSL is still downloading. Telkom got hold of this via the media and is currently in a flat spin. We got a call from Telkom asking us for our circuit numbers so they can make sure we have good service.
Here is the best part. We spend +/- R 45000 a month just on rental for these lines. If we moved to the Avian Carrier Network we will be saving a whopping R 35 000 a month.
Check out the facebook group, do a search for Winston the pigeon on facebook. Also watch the local press for some tongue in cheek articles about our great Helkom.
Regards
NeilPS: The Original White Paper is located here: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html
Also check this link for more info: http://pigeonrace2009.co.za
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LOL that’s is priceless! I’m in Canada now and can download 1 Gig in under 10 Min @ R315 p/m and Cap of 99 Gig / Or my WiFi with a 30 Gig Cap but use over 50 each month no extra charge for R175. I use this to watch all my streaming movies with no issues!
See you birds in Dec;)
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Kevin, you make us all so jealous
. Tomorrow, if weather holds, it is D-day for Pigeon/Telkom race and we all know that the Pigeon is going to win. That is if Telkom does not crook in some way again.
I’m sure the pigeon will win. If you fancy trying it at my location in Durban, the pigeon will win without doubt. no lines for 17 days, work for 12, and now its day 6 of them not working again. Pigeons rock.
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Brilliant! Please keep this updated. Ek kry so lekker dat Helkom uiteindelik hulle gate sien (:
In all seriousness have a look at Riverbed, http://www.riverbed.com. We have a few sites using it due to the compression and deduplicating of data.
But, very nice write up, I laughed very hard.
Haha classic! I am currently living in the UK and have 20mb Fibre Optic broadband through Virgin. It costs me 20 pounds a month with no cap. I download at about 2.3mb a second. Every time I start missing home I just think of the crappy service Telkom gives and their over-inlated prices and I feel a lot better.
I would say a Pigeon is unfair competition. You should strap the micro SD card to the shell of a Snail and send it on its way! Thats more like it…
I’m in London – I pay £16 (R150) for unlimited usage (no cap…cap, what’s a cap?) at 4-8gig speed… i really feel sorry for friends back home in SA…
The pigeon won easily:
http://www.news24.com/Content/SciTech/985/1bc8b09e39b043928317dc769d4196e4/09-09-2009-12-23/Pigeon_beats_Telkom
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Thanks Walter — think nobody thought otherwise .. have created a new post about the win – http://www.henriska.com/blog/?p=625
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It’s a slightly unfair test; your broadband is ADSL. The A stands for ‘asymmetric’ – upload speeds on such things are always very slow. On my home cable broadband, yes, I can download at about 2 megabits, but my upload speed is a pathetic 256kbit. In fact, it’s worse than that – many broadband systems automatically throttle connections which saturate their upload bandwidth (Virgin in the UK certainly do), and I’m lucky if I can sustain half that. The behaviour of your system is completely typical for asymmetric broadband. If you need good upload speed, then you need to pay for a proper leased line, which will be very expensive compared to your ADSL.
Now, I agree that most ISPs are terrible in one way or another, but in this case it’s more or less working the way it’s intended to. You need a much more expensive product if you want high speed uploads.
Having said that, sending storage by non-digital methods is still the fastest way to send large amounts of data, even if you have ludicrously good internet connectivity. Where I work we have a 1 gigabit leased line, which costs a fortune. But we regularly have to send terabytes of data to other sites around the world, and we do it by sending USB desktop hard drives by courier. Nothing beats the bandwidth of disk drives in a van…
Tim, I agree 100% with you ..
In SA, Telkom is known for their bad service and monolistic behaviour and I believe this exercise was more a public stunt to highlight the broadband issues we as South African have to cope with on a daily basis. And by looking at all the press it got, it did succeed in its overall goal.